To Believe in Siri: A Critical Analysis of AI Voice Assistants

AI voice assistants are based on software that enters in 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. Each assistant is represented as an individual character or persona (e.g. “Siri” or “Alexa”) that despite being non-human can be imagined and interacted as such. Focusing on the cases of Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant, this article argues that AI voice assistants activate an ambivalent relationship with users, giving them the illusions of control in their interactions with the assistant while at the same time withdrawing them from actual control over the computing systems that lie behind the interface. 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.