Dreaming Up Smart Home Futures: A Story Completion Study

Virtual assistants, vacuum robots, security systems, and other smart home technologies are rapidly advancing, evolving, and gaining popularity. This raises questions of how people envision future interactions with smart home systems and how they imagine the future roles of such technologies in society. We deployed an online study that collected fictional short stories from 60 participants about smart home interactions. We identifed themes regarding the roles of smart home technologies, social interactions with AI, and concerns about data privacy in the context of the home. We describe our method, discuss insights from the stories that explicitly reflect possible futures and implicitly refect the present, and make design recommendations based on our fndings.