Technogenic Institutional Talk in an AutomatedComputer-Telephone Interviewing System

摘要

The study aims to conceptualize and evaluate a phone-based, natural-language-employing automatedcomputer-telephone interviewing system. It will be argued that the conversational agent by virtue of itstechnical limitations is situated squarely within the interactional ?uncanny valley: precisely because it exhibitsa rudimentary interactivity and can thereby mimic human agency its inability to be fully humanlike becomes apeculiar interactive feature. The system is shown to take on the role of a highly restrictive interrogator ratherthan a regular interviewer: it generates ?institutional talk?. This is shown to be the especially the case whenusers fail to recognize the system as non-human. The findings problematize the overall methodologicalrobustness of state-of-the-art automated surveying agents as such systems may unwittingly introduceresponse biases to a supposedly impersonal surveying method. Conceptually, the study will be grounded insuchman?s ?situated action? paradigm of human-computer interaction as well as Heritage?s ?institutional talk?within conversation analysis.