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"Do Animals Have Accents?": Talking with Agents in Multi-Party Conversation

Published: 25 February 2017 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper we unpack the use of conversational agents, or so-called intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), in multi-party conversation amongst a group of friends while they are socialising in a café. IPAs such as Siri or Google Now can be found on a large proportion of personal smartphones and tablets, and are promoted as 'natural language' interfaces. The question we pursue here is how they are actually drawn upon in conversational practice? In our work we examine the use of these IPAs in a mundane and common-place setting and employ an ethnomethodological perspective to draw out the character of the IPA-use in conversation. Additionally, we highlight a number of nuanced practicalities of their use in multi-party settings. By providing a depiction of the nature and methodical practice of their use, we are able to contribute our findings to the design of IPAs.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
    February 2017
    2556 pages
    ISBN:9781450343350
    DOI:10.1145/2998181
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    Published: 25 February 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. collocated interaction
    2. conversation analysis
    3. conversational agents
    4. ethnomethodology
    5. intelligent personal assistants
    6. mobile devices
    7. multi-party conversation
    8. smartphones

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    CSCW '17: Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
    February 25 - March 1, 2017
    Oregon, Portland, USA

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    CSCW '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 183 of 530 submissions, 35%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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    • (2024)How a Child Learns to ‘Talk’ to a Smart Speaker: On the Emergence of Enlanguaged PracticesLinguistic Frontiers10.2478/lf-2024-00107:1(1-22)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2024
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