Does Siri Have a Soul? Exploring Voice Assistants Through Shinto Design Fictions
Open accessAbstract
It can be difficult to critically reflect on technology that has become part of everyday rituals and routines. To combat this, speculative and fictional approaches have previously been used by HCI to decontextualise the familiar and imagine alternatives. In this work we turn to Japanese Shinto narratives as a way to defamiliarise voice assistants, inspired by the similarities between how assistants appear to 'inhabit' objects similarly to kami. Describing an alternate future where assistant presences live inside objects, this approach foregrounds some of the phenomenological quirks that can otherwise easily become lost. Divorced from the reality of daily life, this approach allows us to reevaluate some of the common interactions and design patterns that are common in the virtual assistants of the present.
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Beyond poor user experience, there is a wellbeing concern related to relying on the Echo Show as a critical part of healthcare.
“Our participants described both individual and shared frustrations directed at the device, but beyond poor user experience, there is a wellbeing [81] (sustained, positive, mental and physical functioning) concern here related to relying on Echo Show as a critical part of healthcare.”
From Amazon Echo Show as a Multimodal Human-to-Human Care Support Tool within Self-Isolating Older UK Households (2022) · cites this paper as [81]
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Do You Mind? User Perceptions of Machine Consciousness
Scott, A. E., Neumann, D., Niess, J., & Woźniak, P. W. (2023) · Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3544548.3581296 · Cited by 46 · see citing works
Soubutts, E., Ayobi, A., Eardley, R., McNaney, R., Cater, K., & O'Kane, A. A. (2022) · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1145/3555193 · Cited by 23 · see citing works
- Authors
- Seymour, W., & Van Kleek, M.
- Affiliations
- University of Oxford (GB)
- University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
- ORCID
- Seymour, William
- Venue
- Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2020-04-25
- Pages
- 1-12
- OpenAlex
- W3010066263
- Cited by
- 25
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 4
- FWCI
- 2.92
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- arxiv.org
- Locations
- CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA) (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/P00881X/1)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Cybernetics and Technology in Society
- Keywords
- voice assistants, Shinto, kami, design fiction, speculative design, embodied presence, phenomenology of technology, everyday rituals, defamiliarization, Japanese mythology, human-technology interaction
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