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Making friends with a Virtual Conversational Assistant (Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri)

Family in a living room seated around a hologram of a humanoid female digital assistant

Our digital lives theme

What’s on offer?

We run the event as an interactive workshop:

  • Introduction on research and playing a fun video on Human-Alexa relationships (10-15 minutes);
  • Starting talk on research participants’ experiences of interacting with virtual conversational assistants and sharing research findings (45 minutes);
  • Ask audience members to share their own experiences and stories with us (15-30 minutes);
  • Give audience members time to interact with two Amazon Eco Dot devices (Alexa), especially those who haven’t used them before. Audience members can then chat with other audiences while enjoying light refreshments (45 minutes); 
  • Ask attendees to tell us which (if any) changes they might make in their lives as a result of attending the session (30 minutes).

What’s it about?

This event is about “Making friends with a Virtual Conversational Assistant (Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri)”. It shows how people build relationships with virtual conversational assistants. The main objective is to improve people’s well-being. This research illustrates people interacting with virtual conversational assistants can acquire social and hedonic value that result in building socio-emotional relationships, enhancing social and mental health.

Who’s leading the event?

Arezoo Fakhimi is a lecturer in Marketing, at Marketing and Strategy Department, Aston University. She holds a Doctor of Marketing Management. She worked on Customer Service Experience of AI-Based Organisational Frontlines. Her research interests lie in the area of services marketing, consumer behaviour, AI-based service encounters, and emergent technologies. Dr Anna Ackfeldt and Dr Andrew Farrell from Marketing and Strategy Department will be involved in running this event.

Open to

This session is for open to 18+ year old people looking to become aware of the benefits of virtual conversational assistants.

Of particular interest to

Adult participants (18+ years old) (no other specifications)