TY  - JOUR
T1  - Everything counts: the managed omnirelevance of speech in 'human – voice agent' interaction
A1  - Rudaz, Damien
A1  - Broth, Mathias
A1  - Mlynar, Jakub
JA  - ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
Y1  - 2026
UR  - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3820655
M2  - doi: 10.1145/3820655
KW  - ethnomethodology
KW  - Human-Centered Computing
KW  - Praxeology
KW  - Turn-taking models
KW  - Voice Agents
N2  - To this day, turn-taking models determining voice agents’ conduct have been examined primarily from a technical point of view, while the ways in which they emerge as interactional constraints or resources for human conversationalists in situ remain underexplored. Drawing on a detailed analysis of corpora of naturalistic data, we document how humans’ conduct was produced in reference to the ever-present risk that, each time they spoke, their talk might trigger a new uncalled-for contribution from the artificial agent. We examine this phenomenon in interactions involving rule-based robots from a ‘pre-LLM era’ as well as the most recent voice agents. This ‘omnirelevance of human speech’ (i.e., the possibility that a conversational agent may erroneously respond to any speech it detects) emerged as a constitutive feature of these human-agent encounters. We describe some of the practices through which humans managed these artificial agents’ turn-taking conduct. Given recent improvements in voice capture technology, we ask whether this ‘omnirelevance of human speech’ weighs even more heavily on human practices today than in the past.
ER  -