Ambii, an alternative digital assistant

what

Ambii, an alternative / ambient digital assistant prototype

when

2020

how

Browser based, built using p5.js

Many of today’s digital assistants—such as Alexa, Siri, and Cortana—are designed as docile, female-gendered characters who exist to answer any factual question or perform a series of mundane tasks such as turning on music. But what if it were otherwise? In this work, I seek to imagine alternative ways of being for digital assistants grounded in critiques from feminist science and technology studies (STS) and the tradition of ambient media. I present Ambii, a geometric agent that runs on a browser and can be interacted with through touch and movement (created using p5.js).

Ambii’s characteristics are drawn from feminist STS critiques of human-machine relations. In particular, I focus on a design challenge my co-author and I pose in a forthcoming article (Wagman & Parks, In Review) to make digital assistants that have a mutual relationship with humans and are non-anthropomorphic. In the article, we argue that human-machine relations that mimic master-slave relations are problematic and that humans should seek non-domineering ways of interacting with machines. Ambii resists a master-slave dynamic by allowing users to co-create a visual artifact: Ambii is constantly moving and creating pattern traces and a user can intervene in this pattern-making through touch and motion. This highlights the mutual shaping of reality by both the digital assistant and the human. Additionally, in the article we point to the tendency for designers to reproduce the “ideal human” when crafting anthropomorphic digital assistants; Ambii avoids this issue by being geometric. Ambii seeks to provide a generative reimagining of human-machine relations that complements pure critique.

Ambii is also a form of ambient media, speaking to emotional rather than cognitive human needs. In his book Ambient Media, Paul Roquet contends, “… the ultimate mood to emerge with ambient media is one of ambivalent calm, a form of provisional comfort that nonetheless registers the presence of external threats.” (Roquet 2016, p. 18). Ambient media is thus capable of triggering a process of self-reflection as well as providing a calm atmosphere. Kelly Dobson (2007) uses the phrase “machine therapy” to refer to the way machines can help humans work through unsurfaced emotions. Ambii builds on this tradition of ambient machine therapy by visually reflecting a user’s interaction pattern: a smooth, thoughtful pattern results from carefully drawn lines and a scattered, messy pattern results from vigorously shaking the phone. The user can look at the visual artifact after an interaction and reflect on what emotions may have been uncovered in the process. Ambii is more than a drawing tool, however, since part of the visual artifact will have been created by its own movement. I hope Ambii sparks a conversation about what kinds of digital assistants could be built if assumptions about “assistance” and anthropomorphic interaction are questioned.