A Glimpse Into Smart Speaker Etiquette

PhD project

PhD student:

Supervisors:

Kami Vaniea (University of Waterloo), Maria Wolters (School of Informatics / OFFIS)

Outputs from this project

Forthcoming!

While often connected to a single account and offering highly personalised services through voice command like phone calls, calendars, notifications, smart speakers like Amazon Echo or Google Nest are rarely used by a single person. Advertised as shared devices, smart speakers invite anyone in the space to interact with their voice-based interaction and are often placed strategically in shared kitchens or living rooms. However, not only do smart speakers come with a plethora of privacy risks like data leakage or privacy invasion, their shared usage has also been found to have caused tensions and conflicts. Both researchers and manufacturers have addressed challenges to protect users and their privacy. Existing solutions, however, target technical vulnerabilities, focus on issues in isolation like bystander privacy, adoption, or transparency, or address smart speakers only as part of the smart home. They do not sufficiently capturing the social context of multi-user smart speakers, and are, thus, not addressing the challenges specific to sharing smart speakers in multi-user households. To understand how users currently experience and regulate shared smart speaker use and how they can be supported, we conducted a group interview study with members of six different households (n=12). Through semi-structured interview questions and sticky note activities, we revealed that households follow an u spoken, yet generally shared smart speaker etiquette consisting of social norms that dictates which interactions were considered acceptable. These norms differed not only between households, but also between members of the household. These unspoken rules covered limitations for existing features, expected behaviour around requesting permissions, interaction practices such as timing and volume, as well as more general norms coordinating sharing such as turn taking and respecting others. Our findings suggest that while norms clearly exist, they are individual to each home and its occupants and require support in communicating and establishing, rather than the application of a universal set of a pre-defined rules. We discuss concrete recommendations on how mukti-user households can be supported in sharing without disrupting existing social dynamics.

Collaborators: Sarah Dunn (University of Edinburgh)

Funder: UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Natural Language Processing

Project dates: 2025