Creepy or curious? Exploring accidental interactions between people and digital voice assistants

Digital voice assistants like Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa are popular technological home devices. Their human-mimicking features allow users to interact with them as if they were another person. However, users report that the assistants sometimes act without being user-initiated, which previous research has shown to make them aware of the devices’ associations with privacy issues. Drawing upon qualitative interviews with people living with digital voice assistants, this paper examines people’s moods and sensations associated with these self-activations. The analysis shows that accidental interactions highlight the ambivalence in affective experiences of living with connected devices, arguing that people’s affective responses are tied to the sensation of exposure and vulnerability to external influence. The study underscores the importance of home as a site for these interactions, arguing that accidental interactions temporarily destabilise the home from being closed, private and safe, to exposed, public and unsafe. However, the article further argues that these bodily sensations and people’s sensemaking of them may serve as a starting point for raising awareness of privacy issues related to smart home devices.