Expectations Management in Smart-Home AI: A Study of Design Tensions
A recent study featured on arXiv (2604.23635) investigates the formation and regulation of expectations surrounding smart-home AI. The research team conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with professionals from Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Azure IoT, and Google Nest, including designers, developers, and researchers. Employing constructivist grounded theory, they introduced Expectations Management (EM), a model that illustrates how practitioners navigate and adjust expectations by balancing organizational rights with culturally specific practices. The findings highlight four persistent design tensions: automation versus autonomy and helpfulness versus interference. Unlike expectation-confirmation theory and trust-calibration, EM emphasizes moral judgment, context-specific actions, and cultural diversity.
Key facts
- 33 semi-structured interviews conducted
- Interviewees from Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Azure IoT, and Google Nest
- Constructivist grounded theory approach used
- Expectations Management (EM) model developed
- Four design tensions identified: automation vs. autonomy, helpfulness vs. i
- EM foregrounds moral judgment, situated action, cross-cultural variation
- Study published on arXiv with ID 2604.23635
- Focus on domestic voice assistants and smart-home devices
Entities
Institutions
- Amazon Alexa
- Microsoft Azure IoT
- Google Nest
- arXiv