No abstract

Social patterns and roles can develop when users talk to intelligent voice assistants (IVAs) daily. The current study investigates whether users assign different roles to devices and how this affects their usage behavior, user experience, and social perceptions. Since social roles take time to establish, we equipped 106 participants with Alexa or Google assistants and some smart home devices and observed their interactions for nine months. We analyzed diverse subjective (questionnaire) and objective data (interaction data). By combining social science and data science analyses, we identified two distinct clusters—users who assigned a friendship role to IVAs over time and users who did not. Interestingly, these clusters exhibited significant differences in their usage behavior, user experience, and social perceptions of the devices. For example, participants who assigned a role to IVAs attributed more friendship to them used them more frequently, reported more enjoyment during interactions, and perceived more empathy for IVAs. In addition, these users had distinct personal requirements, for example, they reported more loneliness. This study provides valuable insights into the role-specific effects and consequences of voice assistants. Recent developments in conversational language models such as ChatGPT suggest that the findings of this study could make an important contribution to the design of dialogic human–AI interactions.

This work reports advances in enabling the use of pneumatic artificial muscles (PAM) as an alternative to electromechanical actuators in upper limb prostheses to take advantage of their low weight, clean, renewable energy source, and force compliance, which is especially suitable for interactions between machines and humans. It describes the model, simulation, and control of a 3-DoF mechanism representing a prosthetic finger using PAM actuators. Its main contribution is the combination and expansion of classic nonlinear models and control methods for robotic systems to allow PAM actuators in the intended application, especially regarding transient effects in the generation of PAM forces. The effectiveness of the proposed mechanism and its associated controller is verified through both numeric simulations and experimental results.