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Title: "All Rise for the AI Director": Eliciting Possible Futures of Voice Technology through Story Completion
How might the capabilities of voice assistants several decades in the future shape human society? To anticipate the space of possible futures for voice assistants, we asked 149 participants to each complete a story based on a brief story stem set in the year 2050 in one of five different contexts: the home, doctor's office, school, workplace, and public transit. Story completion as a method elicits participants' visions of possible futures, unconstrained by their understanding of current technological capabilities, but still reflective of current sociocultural values. Through a thematic analysis, we find these stories reveal the extremes of the capabilities and concerns of today's voice assistants---and artificial intelligence---such as improving efficiency and offering instantaneous support, but also replacing human jobs, eroding human agency, and causing harm through malfunction. We conclude by discussing how these speculative visions might inform and inspire the design of voice assistants and other artificial intelligence.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1734456
PAR ID:
10276866
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
DIS '20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference
Page Range / eLocation ID:
2051 to 2064
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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