The digital age has yielded systems that increasingly reduce the complexity of our everyday lives. As such, smart personal assistants such as Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri combine the comfort of intuitive natural language interaction with the utility of personalized and situation-dependent information and service provision. However, research on SPAs is becoming increasingly complex and opaque. To reduce complexity, this paper introduces a classification system for SPAs. Based on a systematic literature review, a cluster analysis reveals five SPA archetypes:

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In the realm of smart services, smart personal assistants (SPAs) have become a popular medium for value co-creation between service providers and users. The market success of SPAs is largely based on their innovative material properties, such as natural language user interfaces, machine learning-powered request handling and service provision, and anthropomorphism. In different combinations, these properties offer users entirely new ways to intuitively and interactively achieve their goals and thus co-create value with service providers. But how does the nature of the SPA shape value co-creation processes? In this paper, we look through a functional affordances lens to theorize about the effects of different types of SPAs (i.e., with different combinations of material properties) on users’ value co-creation processes. Specifically, we collected SPAs from research and practice by reviewing scientific literature and web resources, developed a taxonomy of SPAs’ material properties, and performed a cluster analysis to group SPAs of a similar nature. We then derived 2 general and 11 cluster-specific propositions on how different material properties of SPAs can yield different affordances for value co-creation. With our work, we point out that smart services require researchers and practitioners to fundamentally rethink value co-creation as well as revise affordances theory to address the dynamic nature of smart technology as a service counterpart.

Ubiquitous Computing describes a concept where computing appears around us at any time and any location. Respective systems rely on context-sensitivity and adaptability. This means that they constantly collect data of the user and his context to adapt its functionalities to certain situations. Hence, the development of Ubiquitous Computing systems is not only a technical issue and must be considered from a privacy, legal and usability perspective, too. This indicates a need for several experts from different disciplines to participate in the development process, mentioning requirements and evaluating design alternatives. In order to capture the knowledge of these interdisciplinary teams to make it reusable for similar problems, a pattern logic can be applied. In the early phase of a development project, requirement patterns are used to describe recurring requirements for similar problems, whereas in a more advanced development phase, design patterns are deployed to find a suitable design for recurring requirements. However, existing literature does not give sufficient insights on how both concepts are related and how the process of deriving design patterns from requirements (patterns) appears in practice. In our work, we give insights on how trust-related requirements for Ubiquitous Computing applications evolve to interdisciplinary design patterns. We elaborate on a six-step process using an example requirement pattern. With this contribution, we shed light on the relation of interdisciplinary requirement and design patterns and provide experienced practitioners and scholars regarding UC application development a way for systematic and effective pattern utilization. • Software and its engineering~Patterns • Software and its engineering~Design patterns • Software and its engineering~Requirements analysis • Software and its engineering~Software development methods • Human-centered computing~Ubiquitous and mobile computing • Human-centered computing~Ubiquitous and mobile computing theory, concepts and paradigms • Human-centered computing~Ubiquitous computing

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