"Phantom Friend" or "Just a Box with Information"

As voice-based conversational agents such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant move into our homes, researchers have studied the corresponding privacy implications, embeddedness in these complex social environments, and use by specific user groups. Yet it is unknown how users categorize these devices: are they thought of as just another object, like a toaster? As a social companion? Though past work hints to human-like attributes that are ported onto these devices, the anthropomorphization of vo

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ethics.ai (7 November 2019), “"Phantom Friend" or "Just a Box with Information",” evidence record 8652, https://ethics.ai/record/8652 (originally published by OpenAlex).

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