Google home: Experience, support and re-experience of social home activities

Ambient intelligence research is about ubiquitous computing and about social and intelligent properties of computer-supported environments. These properties aim at providing inhabitants or visitors of ambient intelligence environments with support in their activities. Activities include interactions between inhabitants and between inhabitants and (semi-) autonomous agents, including mobile robots, virtual humans and other smart objects in the environment. Providing real-time support requires understanding of behavior and activities. Clearly, being able to provide real-time support also allows us to provide off-line support, that is, intelligent off-line retrieval, summarizing, browsing and even replay, possibly in a transformed way, of stored information. Real-time remote access to these computer-supported environments also allows participation in activities and such participation as well can profit from the real-time capturing and interpretation of behavior and activities performed and supported by ambient intelligence technology. In this paper, we illustrate and support these observations by looking at results obtained in several European and US projects, in particular projects on smart environments, whether they are smart meetings or lecture rooms, smart offices or intelligently monitored events in public spaces. In particular, we look at the augmented multi-party interaction (AMI) project in which we are involved and we try to sketch a framework in which we can transform research results from the meeting context to the home environment context.