From Rights to Rites: Expectations Management in Smart-Home AI

TL;DR

This paper introduces Expectations Management (EM), a model explaining how smart-home AI practitioners shape user expectations through moral and cultural considerations, highlighting design tensions and offering a practical EM Design Playbook.

Contribution

It presents the EM model, emphasizing moral judgment and cultural variation, and provides a five-phase EM Design Playbook for responsible smart-home AI design.

Findings

Identified four key design tensions in smart-home AI expectations.

Developed the EM model highlighting moral and cultural factors.

Created a five-phase EM Design Playbook for practitioners.

Abstract

Domestic voice assistants and smart-home devices are increasingly embedded in everyday routines, yet their ethics are often treated as an afterthought or delegated to compliance teams. To explore how expectations about smart-home AI are constructed and managed, we conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with designers, developers, and researchers from major smart-home platforms (Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Azure IoT, and Google Nest). Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, we develop Expectations Management (EM): a culturally embedded model describing how practitioners shape, calibrate, and repair expectations by balancing organisational rights with culturally situated rites. We show that EM differs from expectation-confirmation theory and trust-calibration by foregrounding moral judgement, situated action, and cross-cultural variation. Our analysis reveals four recurring design tensions: automation vs. autonomy, helpfulness vs. intrusiveness, personalisation vs. predictability, and transparency vs. obscurity and distils them into a five-phase EM Design Playbook that supports moral prudence. We discuss implications for responsible smart-home design and offer guidance for human-centred AI.