“Hey Google,you’re stupid”: Framing conversational AI interactions in family discourse

Framing in family discourse

The concept of “frame,” as defined by Goffman (1974: 8), refers to “what it is that’s going on here,” or, alternatively, as phrased by Tannen and Wallat (1993: 59), “a definition of what is going on in an interaction.” Goffman’s theorization of frames has played an important role in discourse analytic research on the complexity of everyday interaction. In particular, “frame lamination,” or the idea that frames are laminated, or layered, in social interaction has been a central topic of discussion in research on framing. Goffman (1981) proposed that “in talk, it seems routine that, while firmly standing on two feet, we jump up and down on another” (p. 155); speakers routinely juggle multiple frames in everyday interaction, and the layering of frames can transform the meaning of an activity. While Goffman did not explicitly discuss how “frame lamination” is achieved in practice, several studies have since explored how speakers manage interactive frames in diverse contexts including medical consultations (Ribeiro, 1993; Tannen and Wallat, 1993), children’s play (Hoyle, 1993; Kyratzis, 2022), academic talk (Pan, 2022), and online livestreaming (Choe, 2020), highlighting the complexity of the interactive work speakers do in everyday life.

In this study, I draw on previous research on frame lamination in family discourse (Gordon, 2002, 2008; Tannen, 2004, 2006), which demonstrates how speakers shift, reframe, and blend frames to discursively accomplish everyday tasks and construct their identities as families. Specifically, I draw on Tannen’s (2006) discussion of “reframing” and Gordon’s (2008) analysis of “blending frames.” Reframing, as defined by Tannen (2006), is “a change in what the discussion is about” (p. 601). Tannen analyzes how reframing is achieved in an extended conflict between a husband and wife that is repeated in various forms throughout the course of a day, and demonstrates how the conflict, which originated from the wife’s request for her husband to take a package to the post office, is reframed in subsequent interactions into a discussion about whether the wife can rely on her husband for his support in other areas of life. Gordon (2008) builds on Tannen’s insights by applying the concept of framing to parent-child interactions, focusing specifically on contexts where a practical parenting task is intertwined with play. Gordon demonstrates how parents reframe an interaction, that is, “transform an interaction from a literal frame to a play frame” (p. 319), and blend frames, that is, simultaneously create two definitions of a situation. Reframing is achieved, for instance, when a mother tries to persuade her daughter to leave the playground by proposing that they race home; in other words, going home is reframed is as a race. Blending frames, on the other hand, is accomplished when a father sings to his daughter while trying to get her ready to go to school. By singing to his daughter, the father establishes a play frame at the same time as he prepares her for school by trying to put her coat on. Gordon (2008) thus illustrates how both blended frames and reframing are “strategies used to interconnect work and play frames” (p. 344), and highlights their role in the work that parents do to balance the demands of creating connection and control in their interactions with their children. While both studies draw on the concept of “reframing,” they use it somewhat differently, with Gordon discussing the phenomenon more specifically in relation to the transformation of non-play frames into play. In this study, I draw on Tannen’s definition of “reframing,” focusing on how the meaning of an interactional moment changes over time as it is brought up in subsequent interactions.

Another relevant thread in research on framing is on the role that non-human entities and objects in the surrounding environment—or more specifically, the knowledge and assumptions speakers have of those objects—can play in speakers’ management of frames. In their analysis of framing in an interaction between a pediatrician, patient, and the patient’s mother, Tannen and Wallat (1993) argue that speakers’ “expectations about people, objects, events, and settings in the world” (p. 60), or their “knowledge schemas” of particular topics or objects, are closely intertwined with how speakers frame a given situation. As İkizoğlu (2021: 10) notes, knowledge schemas and frames are interrelated in that “our understandings of situations are derived from our expectations regarding those situations” and “[s]chemas in turn are developed over repeated exposure to and generalization of such situations.” In Tannen and Wallat’s study, for instance, the authors demonstrate how a mismatch in the doctor and the patient’s mother’s knowledge schemas of the patient’s behaviors/symptoms triggers the doctor to shift from an examination frame to a consultation frame, as she reassures the mother that everything is okay with her child. Likewise, as family members interact with each other in everyday life, their knowledge schemas of the various objects around them come into play in their framing of a situation, as those objects are made a relevant part of the interaction.

This point has been illustrated in several studies on family discourse. Tannen (2004), for instance, analyzes examples of family members talking to or as their pet dogs and demonstrates that “talking through dogs” is used as a resource for speakers to shift frames to a humorous one. In doing so, speakers reproduce relevant knowledge schemas about dogs (such as “the family dog as a watchdog”), as well as reaffirm a shared understanding of their dog as a part of the family. Gordon (2013) focuses on family members’ orientations to an object: the audio recorder they were asked to carry around with them for a research project to record their interactions at home and at work. Gordon shows that the research participants oriented to the recorder in various ways within both literal and play frames. In some contexts, participants treated the recorder as a stand-in for the researchers, or as an audience to entertain; in others, participants oriented to the recorder as a burden, or playfully treated it as a “wire” used for surveillance. These orientations, according to Gordon, show how participants’ knowledge schemas about the recorder shape the ways they interpret and contextualize it in interaction; participants’ conceptualizations of the object can “help create the conversational moments that revolve around it, and afford participants an interactional resource to create unique identities” (Gordon, 2013: 314).

In this sense, the notions of “knowledge schemas” and “interactive frames” also help illuminate Gee’s conceptualization of the relationship between “small-d discourse,” or language in use, and “big-D Discourse,” referring to broader culture-wide ideologies and assumptions. Knowledge schemas are formed in relation to the popular societal Discourses that speakers are exposed to, and these schemas are subsequently invoked and reproduced in everyday discourse within specific interactive frames. As speakers draw on Discourses of particular contexts and communities, they also perform identities, such as those of a doctor or pet owner, in the case of the examples presented above. To explore the interplay between the small-d discourse of family talk and big-D Discourses of AI, I examine how knowledge schemas about AI shape the ways in which my family members manage frames of their interactions with a voice assistant; to do so, I also draw on research on speakers’ orientations to technology in everyday interaction and on popular discourses of (conversational) AI, which I discuss next.

Reframing and blending frames

Excerpt 1 illustrates how one family member’s interaction with Google is reframed through another family member’s retrospective evaluation of its dialog. This excerpt also shows how, in the multilingual context of my home, code-switching serves as a resource for reframing and shifting frames, that is, moving from one frame to another (Tannen and Wallat, 1993). The excerpt is taken from an interaction involving Jackson, Jisoo, and me in which we talk about the weather. In the excerpt, I ask Google for information about the day’s weather in English, but Google responds in Korean; Jackson picks up on this language change and reframes the interaction from an information-seeking encounter to an example of Google “profiling” me as a Korean user.

Excerpt 1. Reframing

There are two points in which code-switching, or alternation between languages, occurs in the excerpt. The first code-switch is done by Google, when it responds to my English question “Hey Google, what’s the weather like today?” (line 1) in Korean. When I turn to discuss the information provided by Google with Jisoo and Jackson, I switch back to English so as to relay the information from Google to Jackson (lines 12–13, “High of twenty six, currently twenty three”). My shift from listening to Google’s and Jisoo’s Korean to speaking in English in line 12 serves as a resource for navigating the frame shift from asking for information from Google to talking to Jisoo and Jackson about what it said. By returning to speaking in English, I include Jackson in the discussion about the weather forecast initiated by my mother (line 5, “That’s nice”) and communicate my shift in orientation to Jisoo and Jackson as my audience.

The first code-switch initiated by Google, on the other hand, is used by Jackson as a resource to reframe my interaction with Google, that is, to “change what the conversation is about” (Tannen, 2006: 597). At the end of the excerpt, Jackson evaluates the interaction as being “very funny” (line 16) and jokes that Google must have “profiled [me]” (line 17) as a Korean user, as it responded to me in Korean despite my addressing it in English. This evaluation serves to reframe my exchange with Google from “a mundane interaction asking for weather-related information” to “evidence of surveillance by Google.” This joke comes in the context of Jackson having made multiple jokes about voice assistants surveilling our interactions at home during the course of the study. Jackson works in government and so is familiar with discussions about security concerns caused by devices like voice assistants; because this is the case, he often jokes around by exaggerating his suspicion of such devices. Google’s unprompted code-switch to Korean thus provides Jackson an opportunity to reframe my question-answer exchange with Google to jokingly further his “conspiracy theory” about our household being monitored by Google.

Next, I demonstrate how blending frames is achieved in an interaction where Jinyoung becomes increasingly frustrated by Google’s inability to understand his questions. Excerpt 2 is taken from an interaction where Jinyoung repeatedly asks Google what kind of food dogs like to eat (a question stemming from his fascination with my then newly adopted dog). While Jinyoung was navigating this interaction with Google, Jisoo and I were watching and occasionally commenting on his continued efforts to elicit a proper response to his question. Jinyoung made about ten attempts to get Google to answer his question, all of which resulted in silence from Google or the response “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” Eventually, Jinyoung reached a point where he expressed his frustration to Google, which is shown in the below excerpt.

Excerpt 2. Blending frames.

In line 5, Jinyoung finally elicits a response from Google, but it is nonsensical, and completely unrelated to his question; Jinyoung asks Google “what kinds of food do dogs like” (line 4) but Google responds “I like fog” (line 5). Jinyoung repeats the same question in line 8, but again receives the same response from Google in line 8. As Jisoo starts laughing at their exchange in line 9, Jinyoung seems to start giving up on trying to get Google to answer his question, and, instead tells Google, “Hey Google, you’re stupid” (lines 10–11). This utterance, while clearly marked as being addressed to Google with his use of the hotword “Hey Google,” is also directed toward his audience of Jisoo and me, as it serves to entertain his family and save face for himself by putting the responsibility of their failed communication on Google. In this sense, this utterance blends the frames of Jinyoung’s question-answer exchange with Google and that of the conversation in which it is situated. While Jinyoung’s interaction with Google ends in failure, his attempt at entertaining Jisoo and me appears to be met with success, based on Jisoo’s response of laughter in line 19.

Jinyoung’s utterance “Hey Google, you’re stupid” is reminiscent of an example Gordon (2008) provides of parents blending work and play frames, in which a mother blends her role-play with her daughter as fairy godmothers with the task of feeding her daughter by telling her, “Fairy Godmother, I think you better sit down and eat your yogurt” (p. 321). Jinyoung’s utterance similarly blends multiple frames by using a term of address strongly associated with one frame (“Hey Google,” associated with initiating an interaction with Google) to make a comment that is more relevant to another frame (“you’re stupid,” associated with entertaining Jisoo and me). It is also akin to the example that Reeves and Porcheron (2023) provide of one of their study participants apologizing to their Amazon Echo on behalf of another participant, who had told Amazon Echo to “shut up.” Reeves and Porcheron note that while the apology, “Alexa, Nikos apologizes for being so rude,” appears to be directed to Alexa (cued by their use of the hotword “Alexa”), it serves as an indirect rebuke of Nikos. Similarly, Jinyoung’s telling Google “you’re stupid,” appears to be an instance of impoliteness to a device, but is in fact directed to both the device and other human interlocutors in the speaker’s immediate surroundings. Both examples show that devices are drawn in as resources for members of a social setting to interact with each other, for instance for people to joke with each other, through utterances that, following Gordon (2008), I characterize as “blending” frames. By drawing on these studies, my analysis highlights how Gordon’s notion of blending frames can provide a useful perspective to understand how utterances that are seemingly directed toward a device can simultaneously play a role in the social interactions in which they are situated.

Excerpts 1 and 2 thus illustrate how my family members bring our interactions with Google into our conversations with each other through utterances that reframe and blend frames. In the following section, I take a closer look at the role that our evaluations of Google’s dialog play in our such management of frames.

Evaluation as meaning-making

The role that evaluation plays in imbuing objects and events with meaning has long been recognized in narrative analysis, with Labov and Waletzky (1967) noting that evaluative clauses in narratives serve to communicate the point of the story. Here, in the context of my family’s interactions with Google and with each other, evaluation allows us to orient to conversational moments in the immediate past to reframe the moment, often in a humorous light; this, in a way, creates “small stories” (Georgakopoulou, 2006) out of those moments, and serves for us to construct humor and solidarity with each other (for further discussion of storytelling about AI through evaluation of AI-produced utterances, see Koh, 2024). In reframing our interactions with Google by evaluating its speech output, we often seem to orient to the knowledge schema of “AI as intelligent machines” by characterizing Google as acting with intelligence and/or intent.

Excerpt 3 presents an example of how evaluation of Google’s dialog is used to reframe an exchange with the device into an opportunity for building solidarity between family members. The excerpt is taken from an interaction that I had with my father Jinyoung (with Jisoo and Jackson sitting nearby) in which I was trying to teach him how to time his commands to the device. As Jinyoung struggles to be “heard” by Google, he repeatedly turns to Jackson to engage with him in English, to recruit Jackson as a sympathetic witness to his struggle.

Excerpt 3. Evaluation as solidarity.

The excerpt shows Jinyoung attempting and failing multiple times to ask Google about the distance between DC and Williamsburg. In his first attempt, he leaves too long a pause between the hotword “Hey Google” and his question, and so misses the opportunity to ask Google his question. In the other three attempts, it appears that Google was not able to understand his question due to either his dialect or the pauses he takes as he formulates his question. As he navigates this series of failures, Jinyoung intermittently code-switches to English to address Jackson and keep him in the loop of our mostly Korean conversation, in which Jisoo and I cheer him on as he continues to try and fail at asking Google his question. In lines 9 and 19, Jinyoung says to Jackson that he was “disqualified,” reframing Google’s inability to understand his question as Google barring him from interacting with it. These comments not only serve to cue Jackson into what is going on in our conversation, but also to present Jinyoung’s role in his interaction with Google in a more sympathetic light. After facing two more failed attempts at asking Google his question, Jinyoung addresses Jackson again in lines 28–29, as indicated through his use of English, to evaluate Google by saying “He-he.. reject me, again and again.” ¹ In his complaint about Google, Jinyoung again reframes Google’s responses to his questions as an expression of rejection, and thereby more explicitly attempts to elicit sympathy from Jackson by presenting himself as being repeatedly spurned by Google. Jinyoung succeeds in achieving this goal, as Jackson responds by saying “Oh no,” to commiserate with Jinyoung’s struggle.

In the next example, an evaluation of Google’s dialog elicits a response of laughter from family members. Excerpt 4 features an interaction involving Jisoo, Jackson, and me as we try out the “interpreter mode” on Google, which is a feature I had discovered while playing around with the device. The feature allows Google to produce translations without the user having to say “Hey Google translate this to English/Korean” each time; instead, Google automatically translates what its users say into the requested language. However, Google does not always succeed in smoothly transitioning between the two languages, as shown in the below excerpt.

Excerpt 4. Evaluation as humor.

As we start experimenting with the “interpreter mode” feature, Jackson chimes in with one of the Korean phrases he has learned, “I love you” (“사랑해요”) (line 13). Although Google is supposed to translate Korean speech into English and vice versa, it fails to translate Jackson’s Korean utterance and instead repeats “I love you” in Korean. In response, I gleefully evaluate Google’s response as a “burn” (line 17), that is, an insult to Jackson’s Korean, reframing Google’s failure to produce the correct translation as evidence of Jackson’s Korean utterance having been “recognized as English” (line 18) due to his poor pronunciation. My excitement over Google’s mistranslation of my husband’s Korean utterance is evident in the interjection “ooh” preceding the word “burn,” which is also drawn out and said with louder volume for dramatic effect. In doing so, I draw on Google as a resource to playfully reframe Google’s failure to produce a translation as an insult to Jackson’s Korean, prompting everyone, including Jackson, to laugh. Jisoo follows up my comment with another evaluation of Google. Jisoo points out that Google is “very clever” (line 22), joking that Google recognizes Jackson as a “foreigner” (line 23), that is, not a Korean, and so translates his speech into Korean rather than English. Jisoo thus reframes the interaction once again, this time by attributing Google’s choice of the wrong language to its “clever” ability to recognize that Jackson is a foreigner (which is a fact) rather than his poor Korean (which is a negative evaluation). At the same time, her laugher (line 19) also positively acknowledges my attempt at humor, thereby allowing her to construct solidarity with both of us.

Excerpts 3 and 4 not only illustrate how evaluations of Google and its dialog are used to reframe out interactions with the device into opportunities for constructing solidarity and humor between family members, but also how often our evaluations associate it with intelligence and intent. This also applies to Excerpts 1 and 2, which feature similar instances of evaluation. The theme of intelligence is featured in Excerpt 2, where Jinyoung calls Google “stupid,” and Excerpt 4, where Jisoo does the opposite by evaluating Google as being “very clever.” These evaluations, while expressing different assessments of Google, both associate its ability to respond appropriately to users with its “intelligence.” Excerpts 1, 3, and 4 all feature attributions of intent to Google (and in doing so, arguably attribute it with social intelligence). In Excerpt 1, Jackson says that Google must be “profiling” me, while in Excerpt 3, Jinyoung accuses Google of “disqualifying” and “rejecting” him. I attribute intent to Google in Excerpt 4 when I reframe its mistaken translation of Jackson’s Korean utterance as an insult to his language skills.

The recurrence of such evaluations in my data highlights how commonly such traits are associated with AI and illustrates how our everyday practices in talking about such devices reflect big-D Discourses about AI as intelligent machines. As mentioned, Gordon (2013) notes that speakers draw on their knowledge schemas to interpret technological objects in any given conversational moment; in the data I have analyzed, it is clear that the association of Google with intelligence and intent is a part of my family’s knowledge schema about the device and the technology on which it operates. Of course, such knowledge schemas are not unique to my family; as previously discussed, Reeves and Porcheron (2023: 574) remark that AI systems are routinely agentified ² in popular discourse, with claims of AI chatbots displaying “understanding” or “knowledge” of natural language being a key part of how they are marketed to the public. The way my family draws on such Discourses of AI is reminiscent of how Tovares (2012) has shown family members incorporate public discourse, such as references to TV shows, into private interaction Given how frequently the capabilities of conversational AI are exaggerated in relation to the notion of “AI as intelligent machines” in public discourse, then, it is perhaps unsurprising how often similar language is used by my family members in their evaluations of Google’s dialog, albeit most often in a joking manner. We do not attribute such qualities to Google because we believe that it is a sentient being participating in social interactions as humans do, but our everyday use of such language in association with Google nonetheless draws on and contributes to the pattern of attributing agency and intelligence to such devices.