Open Access

Dominik Pins, Fatemeh Alizadeh, Alexander Boden, Sebastian Zilles, Gunnar Stevens

• Voice assistants (VAs) in households are becoming increasingly commonplace, with many users expressing their appreciation of the devices’ convenience. Nonetheless, a notable number of users have raised concerns that the devices are ‘always listening’, and that there is a lack of clear information from providers about the data collected and processed through their microphones. Adopting a socio-informatics research perspective, we used the living lab approach to work with users over three years to investigate their uncertainties regarding the data collected by VAs in everyday usage. Based on our findings from interviews, fieldwork, and participatory design workshops with 35 households, we developed the web tool “CheckMyVA” to support users to access and visualize their own VA data. This chapter presents the observations and findings of the three-year study by outlining the implemented features of the tool and reflecting on how its design can help improve data literacy and enable users to reflect on their long-term interactions with VAs, ultimately serving to ‘demystify’ the technology.