User practices in dealing with trouble in interactions with virtual assistants in German: Repeating, altering and insisting

Abstract

Moments of trouble and miscommunication occur regularly when users interact with virtual assistants like smart speakers. To add to the understanding of how users treat moments of trouble in everyday interactions with a virtual assistant (VA) in German, this paper reports on a conversation analytic study of practices that users deploy after a request to a VA has failed. The repair sequences that we analyse show users orienting to different trouble sources and employing a range of practices to resolve trouble, including repeating, altering their formulations and formulating related (new) requests. Most often, troubles are resolved after one instance of repair. Other repair sequences include several instances of repair and show more complex and diverse practices being employed. In some of these sequences, users ‘insist’ on their initial goal and/or strategy and do not always observably orient to the VA’s local reactions. In these cases, the interactional history with the VA and previously successful requests seem to play a role as well in the users’ local conduct.