Paper Info
Title
Digital ethnography of home use of digital personal assistants
Abstract
Commercialised voice user interface devices for the home, like Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod, with integrated digital personal assistants have rapidly grown in popularity. These devices embody intelligent software agents that support users in their everyday life through easy and intuitive conversational interactions. While their use in everyday activities is largely unexplored, the proliferation in home use presents a valuable opportunity to add to understanding around the use of in-home digital personal assistants. In this paper, we investigate their home use in a broad context to learn more about people's experiences, attitudes, interactions and expectations with these devices contributing new insights to current knowledge around this use. Applying the digital ethnography method, we collected 3542 reviews and comments about Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod on Amazon, eBay, and Reddit. Six main themes and 29 categories were derived through filtering, thematic analysis and affinity diagramming. These findings constitute a conceptual framework characterising the current landscape of home use of digital personal assistants. Additionally, we identify and discuss unique issues discovered around the invisible interface, interactive freedom, and creative appropriation. We use our findings to propose implications for interaction design of DPAs for home use.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1080/0144929X.2020.1834620
BEHAVIOUR & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Voice user interface, smart home, digital personal assistant, digital ethnography, intelligent software agent
Journal
41
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
0144-929X
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jeni Paay149540.51
Jesper Kjeldskov21840141.58
Kathrine Maja Hansen300.68
Tobias Jørgensen400.68
Katrine Leth Overgaard500.68