Conversational user interfaces in smart homecare interactions: a conversation analytic case study
Policymakers are increasingly interested in using virtual assistants to augment social care services in the context of a demographic ageing crisis. At the same time, technology companies are marketing conversational user interfaces (CUIs) and smart home systems as assistive technologies for elderly and disabled people. However, we know relatively little about how today’s commercially available CUIs are used to assist in everyday homecare activities, or how care service users and human care assistants interpret and adapt these technologies in practice. Here we report on a longitudinal conversation analytic case study to identify, describe, and share how CUIs can be used as assistive conversational agents in practice. The analysis reveals that, while CUIs can augment and support new capabilities in a homecare environment, they cannot replace the delicate interactional work of human care assistants. We argue that CUI design is best inspired and underpinned by a better understanding of the joint coordination of homecare activities.
Funding
BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant: SRG19 191529
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Communication and Media
Published in
CUI '23: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User InterfacesPages
1–12Source
5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI ’23)Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© Owner/AuthorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2023-04-05Publication date
2023-07-19Copyright date
2023ISBN
9798400700149Publisher version
Language
- en