To Believe in Siri

Abstract

AI voice assistants are based on software that enters into dialogue with users through speech in order to provide replies to the users’ queries or execute tasks such as sending emails, searching on the web, or turning on a lamp. Every assistant is represented as an individual character or persona (e.g., “Siri” or “Alexa”) that despite being nonhuman can be imagined and interacted with as such. Focusing on the cases of Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, this chapter argues that voice assistants activate an ambivalent relationship with users, giving them the illusion of control in their interactions with the assistants while at the same time withdrawing them from actual control over the computing systems that lie behind these interfaces. The chapter illustrates how this is made possible at the interface level by mechanisms of projection that expect users to contribute to the construction of the assistant as a persona, and how this construction ultimately conceals the networked computing systems administered by the powerful corporations who developed these tools.