  It can be difficult to critically reflect on technology that has become part
of everyday rituals and routines. To combat this, speculative and fictional
approaches have previously been used by HCI to decontextualise the familiar and
imagine alternatives. In this work we turn to Japanese Shinto narratives as a
way to defamiliarise voice assistants, inspired by the similarities between how
assistants appear to 'inhabit' objects similarly to kami. Describing an
alternate future where assistant presences live inside objects, this approach
foregrounds some of the phenomenological quirks that can otherwise easily
become lost. Divorced from the reality of daily life, this approach allows us
to reevaluate some of the common interactions and design patterns that are
common in the virtual assistants of the present.
