Lauren Hall, Elizabeth Peel & Saul Albert Download transcripts | Keywords: Agency, Virtual Assistants, Participation, Footing, Technology How should we understand participation and agency in talk involving voice interfaces? ‘Conversational technologies’ are proliferating both in everyday life and, by extension, in conversation analytic research (Stokoe et al., 2024). Interactional studies…
Download Transcript | Keywords: Virtual Assistants; AI; Wake Words; Summons; Turn design ‘Wake words’ such as “Alexa”, “OK Google” and “Hey Siri” have become commonplaces within everyday talk, used to ‘summon’ virtual assistants on ‘smart’ speakers and phones. However, relatively little is known about how wake words are designed and produced in everyday settings and […]
Saul Albert, s.b.albert@lboro.ac.uk, Loughborough University Elliott Hoey, e.m.hoey@vu.nl, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Chase W. Raymond, chase.raymond@colorado.edu, University of Colorado Boulder This is a blog version of a talk I gave with Elliott Hoey and Chase Raymond at the International Conference on Conversation Analysis (ICCA) 2026 in Edmonton on the 28th June 2026. I’ve kept close to […]
In 2020 I did a talk entitled ‘Three meeting points between Conversation Analysis and AI’ – this is a one-slide updated lit review. A lot has happened! References Alač, M., Gluzman, Y., Aflatoun, T., Bari, A., Jing, B., & Mozqueda, G. (2020). How everyday interactions with digital voice assistants resist a return to the individual. […]
Annual Finnish Social Psychology Conference, Tampere, 8 May 2026 Abstract Public and scientific discourses about ‘AI’ treat ‘artificiality’ as an inherent property of machines, and ‘intelligence’ as an inherent property of persons. Drawing on conversation analysis and discursive psychology, I will argue that both are better understood as interactional achievements, produced turn-by-turn in the…
The ‘intelligence’ of any participant in conversation is constantly in question. A beat too long of silence, one too many disfluencies, or an unaccountable action can occasion the withdrawal of attributions of competence, agency, and even personhood. Certain categories are especially vulnerable to inferences about atypicality and incompetence (Walton et al., 2020) including disabled people, […]
Repairing the Common Ground between Conversation Analysis and Conversational Technologies Abstract Computational linguistics and dialogue systems research share many terms and concepts with conversation analysis, but there are some irreconcilable di5erences in how key conversational phenomena are understood and operationalised between these fields. This leads to misunderstandings (at best) and…
Saul Albert∗, Hendrik Buschmeier, Katharina Cyra, Christiane Even, Magnus Hamann, Jakub Mlynář, Hannah Pelikan, Martin Porcheron, Stuart Reeves, Philippe Sormani & Sylvaine Tuncer† Citation: Albert, S., Buschmeier, H. Cyra, K., Even, C., Hamann, M., Licoppe, C., Mlynář, J., Pelikan, H., Porcheron, M., Reeves, S., Rudaz, D., Sormani, P., Tuncer, S. (2023, November 6-7). What ‘counts’ as an […]
This paper contributes to research on the role of technology in ‘atypical’ interaction by examining a situation in which the technology takes on the stigma of atypicality. Building on our analysis, we argue that this approach provides a model for assistive technology research and development that moves away from a techno-medical model and focuses on […]
Saul Albert, Magnus Hamann, Elizabeth Stokoe Abstract: 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 market- ing conversational user interfaces (CUIs) and smart home systems as assistive technologies for elderly and disabled people. However, we […]