Does Siri Have a Soul? Exploring Voice Assistants Through Shinto Design Fictions William Seymour Max Van Kleek Abstract Dept. of Computer Science Dept. of Computer Science It can be difficult to critically reflect on technology that has University of Oxford, UK University of Oxford, UK become part of everyday rituals and routines. To combat
[email protected] [email protected] this, speculative and fictional approaches have previously been used by HCI to decontextualise the familiar and imag- ine alternatives. In this work we turn to Japanese Shinto narratives as a way to defamiliarise voice assistants, in- spired by the similarities between how assistants appear to ‘inhabit’ objects similarly to kami. Describing an alter- nate 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 arXiv:2003.03207v1 [cs.HC] 6 Mar 2020 some of the common interactions and design patterns that are common in the virtual assistants of the present. Author Keywords Voice Assistants, Design Fiction, Critical Design, Shinto Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or CCS Concepts classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed •Human-centered computing ! Natural language inter- for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM faces; Interaction design theory, concepts and paradigms; must be honored.