  Modern conversational agents such as Alexa and Google Assistant represent
significant progress in speech recognition, natural language processing, and
speech synthesis. But as these agents have grown more realistic, concerns have
been raised over how their social nature might unconsciously shape our
interactions with them. Through a survey of 500 voice assistant users, we
explore whether users' relationships with their voice assistants can be
quantified using the same metrics as social, interpersonal relationships; as
well as if this correlates with how much they trust their devices and the
extent to which they anthropomorphise them. Using Knapp's staircase model of
human relationships, we find that not only can human-device interactions be
modelled in this way, but also that relationship development with voice
assistants correlates with increased trust and anthropomorphism.
