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The
Social Human-Agent Interactions (sHAI)
Group

Our research

Technology is being developed at an incredible pace, yet many questions about our social interaction with technology remain unanswered. We interact with chatbots on an almost daily basis, but why do we sometimes feel like we are talking to an actual human instead of a machine? Robots are used by the army to detonate explosives, but what if we start to feel upset or guilty when they get destroyed? Self-driving cars seem incredibly promising, but can we trust them to make moral decisions? The sHAI Group, first established at Radboud University Nijmegen (NL), aims to investigate such interactions in an interdisciplinary manner: we combine insights from computer science, artificial intelligence, robotics, psychology, communication science, and cognitive science. More information on our group members, their projects, and publications can be found below.

News & Events

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sHAI in the Media

sHAI Updates

Latest Publications

The Google family home

Smart speaker use in Dutch families and the impact of parents’ individual and contextual characteristics

Smart speakers are a growing phenomenon in families with young children. Yet, early scholarship suggests that the reality of welcoming a smart speaker in the family and ongoingly using it is rather complex – not only because of the non-uniformity of families who own a device, but also because smart speaker use in the family space is, in itself, multi-dimensional. This study looks beyond initial device ownership and acknowledges a triad of considerations for ongoing smart speaker use in families: how often (frequency) the smart speaker is used for what (purpose) and by whom (form) in the family. Based on N = 370 Dutch parents, who have at least one young child at home and have possessed a Google Assistant-smart speaker device for minimally the past six months, we uncover six common types of use. We also find that especially individual trust dispositions of parents and their perceptions of certain narratives in the news media context shape these different ways of smart speaker use. 

© 2025 sHAI Group

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