Social Boundaries for Personal Agents in the Interpersonal Space of the Home

Abstract

The presence of voice activated personal assistants (VAPAs) in people's homes rises each year [31]. Industry efforts are invested in making interactions with VAPAs more personal by leveraging information from messages and calendars, and by accessing user accounts for 3rd party services. However, the use of personal data becomes more complicated in interpersonal spaces, such as people's homes. Should a shared agent access the information of many users? If it does, how should it navigate issues of privacy and control? Designers currently lack guidelines to help them design appropriate agent behaviors. We used Speed Dating to explore inchoate social mores around agent actions within a home, including issues of proactivity, interpersonal conflict, and agent prevarication. Findings offer new insights on how more socially sophisticated agents might sense, make judgements about, and navigate social roles and individuals. We discuss how our findings might impact future research and future agent behaviors.