Smart voice assistants have become popular thanks largely to their default naturalistic female voices and helpful personae. In this article, we trace changes in robot voices in popular culture and explain how this history influenced the voice design of smart voice assistants. Our research draws on cultural analysis of Hollywood and international films, television and literature, and observations from our personal experiences with voice assistants. We argue that designers of devices like the Google Home and Amazon Echo inherited a cultural imaginary of alien and dangerous robots with artificial voices and personalities. Manufacturers leveraged techniques of modality, personae and invocation and pre-existing social connotations of the voice to create positive associations of these devices in the home. We conclude by arguing that smart voice assistants are new media innovations prepared for consumers through pre-domestication and represent an emerging regime of power and influence based on technologised voice interaction.

In mid-2022, AI systems automatically translating text into evocative original images became an internet sensation. People compared it to magic: invoking an uncannily competent artist–magician. We call it ‘autolography’ from the Greek ‘automatos + logos + graphos’ (self + word + drawing). Following a discourse analysis of online publications comparing autolography to magic, we analyse its enthusiastic reception from some and critique from others. We identify historical parallels and divergences between the reception of contemporary autolography and early photography: the reduction or transformation of creative labour, negotiations over intellectual property, the alleged democratisation of visual cultural production, and the association with the Western magical imagination. Both photography and autolography prompted renegotiations of artistic practices, professional identities and intellectual property laws. However, rather than being a mechanical eye on the world, autolography undermines faith in images by invoking digitally uncanny materialisations of floating signifiers from AI models.

This article provides new evidence of the ways that smart cities materialize within specific sites and contexts through smart street furniture (SSF). Drawing on empirical data generated through mixed-method field research, the article examines the situated data relations that emerge in the context of the adoption of InLinkUK smart kiosks in Glasgow and Strawberry Energy smart benches in London. The concept of “silences” is proposed to analyze insufficiently articulated data relations resulting from gaps or absences in the use, design, and governance of this new type of urban furniture. The argument made is that data silences lead to failures to account for decisions and the deferral of responsibilities regarding the data aspects of these objects. It is suggested that an approach that focuses on “listening” to and “speaking” about data relations can enable dialogical forms of accountability, and realize the potential of SSF for citizens in local contexts.

Digital media increasingly mediate everyday spatial and navigational practices. From in-car satellite navigation (sat navs) to computer games, overpowered gadgets are combining multiple sources of abstract information to give users spatial guidance and experiences of movement. For example, open world computer games such as Grand Theft Auto IV render rich fictional spaces, and include intricate maps and indicators that allow players to navigate large gamespaces. Sat navs such as the TomTom Navigator follow similar practices of automated navigation in helping to guide cars through actual spaces. Their calculated routes display on personalized maps, including live data and visualizations that complement, or even override, what the driver sees through the windscreen. Games and sat navs are harbingers of historical shifts in technosocial space, suggesting that Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) influential critical analysis of space deserves to be revised. Digital spatial media open up abstract relationships to space, but not from the distance that Lefebvre associates with ‘conceived’ spaces. Instead, they work in ‘lived space’, which is becoming dominant. They calculate space in real time, and open up new political and aesthetic questions. The article examines three characteristics of navigation with digital spatial media: (1) they reify routes as persuasive data and procedures; (2) their maps become subjective and privatized; and (3) they offer an array of spatial information that become incorporated into the user’s ‘perceived’ space. These examples show that critical understandings of social space need increasingly to incorporate readings of digitally mediated spatiality.