My team and I have a new article out in New Media & Society (lead authored by Rebecca Wald along with Theo Araujo, and Annemarie van Oosten) that looks at how Dutch news media have portrayed virtual assistants – Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and related systems – over the past decade.
Using a large corpus of Dutch news messages from 2011–2022 (N = 2,059) and an inductive computational framing approach, we map both how much attention virtual assistants received and how that coverage was framed. We find that news attention rose over time and peaked in 2019, followed by a decline through 2022.
We also find a shift in the way virtual assistants were discussed. Specifically, two frames stand out across this period: “AI systems and society” (72%), which places virtual assistants within wider debates about AI, ethics, policy, and the power of major technology firms (i.e., societal impact), and “Voice assistants and users” (28%), which focuses more directly on functions, devices, audio/voice use cases, and everyday user experiences (i.e., personal impact). Interestingly, we see a time dynamic where the personal-focused frame most often comes first, followed by a broader societal-impact frame as the issue becomes more widely salient. These patterns help clarify what people may be learning about virtual assistants through news, and provides useful context for research on technology adoption and public perceptions.
Read the full article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448251413694
Wald, R., Araujo, T., van Oosten, J. M. F., & Piotrowski, J. T. (2026). What does the news say about Siri, Alexa, and co.? A topic model network analysis of Dutch news messages about virtual assistants between 2011 and 2022. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251413694