The Voice Assistants and Discursive Practices: the Analysis of User Experience and Speech Interaction

The development of digital and communication technologies in recent decades has taken on a global scale. A relatively new trend is the creation of devices based on artificial intelligence, giving the machine personality and character. The key technology in this area can be considered voice assistant technology, the market of which is actively developing in Russia, contributing to the active penetration of voice agents into modern everyday life. However, the scientific community still lacks an understanding of how the growth of human-like technologies affects the development of human-machine relationships and what social consequences may arise from their embedding in the system of everyday life. The discursive practices of communicating with voice agents are of particular interest in this context, as they allow not only to reveal the specificity of the communicative messages of human-voice-assistant relationships, but also to highlight the significant social aspects of such communication. Therefore, the aim of this study is to identify and systematise the discourses that are formed in interaction with speech agent technology. In order to determine the discourse order of such communication using a mixed methodology, we analysed non-reactive data on interaction with the technology: 290 videos on the Youtube platform in the genre "jokes with Alice", 5557 comments by platform users under the analysed video content, as well as 175 reviews about Yandex.Alice on the websites otzovik, irecommend, otzov-mf. As a result of the study, it was found that the order of organising interaction with voice assistant technology is contradictory in terms of the conflicting configuration of discourses in human-machine communication. Such a conflict is ensured by the collision of contradictory phenomena and tendencies: despite the prevalence of the idea of the distinction between man and machine, represented by the discourses of abuse and 'the other', there are patterns of immersion of communication in social norms, attitudes and prejudices, represented by the gender discourse, as well as discourses of politeness and 'anthropomorphism' in the general discourse structure. Thus, in the current socio-cultural reality, there is no unified view to define the status and role of technological interaction partners. Nevertheless, linguistic agents are becoming 'invisible' participants in social processes that maintain the general order of the social system, and the devices themselves, under conditions of increasing humanity, face a dual categorisation associated with the attribution of the role of both a machine and a social actor, in relation to which gendered expectations, roles and norms are manifested. This phenomenon also has important social consequences: in conjunction with the creation of technological artefacts that vividly and actively demonstrate the stereotypical behaviour of the 'feminine image', there is an active penetration of gendered practices into everyday life, reinforcing the spread and entrenchment of gender stereotypes.