The ‘intelligence’ of any participant in conversation is constantly in question. A beat too long of silence, one too many disfluencies, or an unaccountable action can occasion the withdrawal of attributions of competence, agency, and even personhood. Certain categories are especially vulnerable to inferences about atypicality and incompetence (Walton et al., 2020) including disabled people, young children, machines, and animals (Edwards 1994). However, when we analyse conversation involving parties conventionally seen as ‘atypical’ or ‘artificial’ such as in smart homecare settings involving disabled people, human carers, and virtual assistants, we see how these categories are constructed and reflexively used as interactional resources. This talk focuses on practices of repair in talk to, at, or around technologies that “travel under the sign of AI” (Suchman 2023) in a range of settings involving disabled people. In these settings, ‘assistive technology’ use is often circumscribed by rhetorics of techno-solutionism, tensions between conceptual models of disability and autonomy, and the everyday interactional experiences of disabled people (Cluly et al. 2020). Analysing the perspicuous setting of ‘smart homecare’ shows us how our interactional practices of talking with, at, and around ‘AI’ and other ‘atypical’ interactants reflexively construct attributions of intelligence and typicality (Albert et al., 2023; Albert & Hall, 2024). Treating ‘intelligence’ and ‘typicality’ as distributed, contingent accomplishments rather than as the preordained status of individual subjects allows us to look beyond conventional framings of AI as ‘conversational technology’ (Stokoe et al. 2024), to explore its role in the social infrastructure that Harvey Sacks (1984, p. 413) described as ‘the technology of conversation’.
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