Enacting ambient care: Smart speakers and the negotiation of intergenerational care in Chinese families

Amid rapid population aging and shifting expectations of filial responsibility, this study investigates how smart speakers are shaping the negotiation of intergenerational care in Chinese families. Drawing on in-depth interviews with older adults and industry experts, we advance the concept of ambient care to capture the subtle, unobtrusive, and backgrounded ways in which smart speakers become embedded in intergenerational care relations. Our analysis identifies three roles through which ambient care is enacted: as a metronome of life that scaffolds temporally ordered self-care routines; as reverberations of affect that sustain companionship and kinship presence; and as a normative amplifier that renders intergenerational care expectations socially and acoustically salient. By conceptualizing techno-mediated care as a socio-material process, this study enriches our understanding of how technology becomes entangled with care in aging societies and contributes to broader discussions about the redistribution of care in the age of artificial intelligence.