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Our everyday life is increasingly permeated with digital objects that carry out smart and complex functions. The latest (but certainly not final) advancement of smart digital applications – is to be identified the creation of a field, at once conceptual and material, of things denominated  smart objects  (henceforth SOs). This technological evolution is so pervasive that it is referred to as  smartification . Smart objects have some distinctive features including in particular varying degrees of  agency ,  autonomy  and  authority . There is no doubt that the SO category is extremely broad, various and intrinsically fuzzy, it is evident that the phenomenon is by no means easy to define: which objects are really  smart  and which are not? But above all: what do we  mean  in semio-linguistic, and not psychological nor merely phenomenological terms, when we attribute the qualifier  smart  to an artifact? What is clear is that a new, or at least different (and controversial) relationship is developing between objects and subjects, or rather between human beings and objects inhabiting the spaces of social action: that is, a new system of objects, to cite  Baudrillard (1968) , or a  new  “society of objects” (see  Landowski and Marrone 2002 ). In this paper we will focus on a type of  smart physical device  designed to interact with its users in the domestic sphere, assisting them in a variety of tasks – such as for example Amazon Echo, capable of connecting to Alexa, an  intelligent personal assistant  based on  machine learning , or the more recent Google Assistant. Our semiotic-oriented – or, more precisely, potentially socio-semiotic/ethno-semiotic – analysis will deal with these issues theoretically by concentrating on the problem of  identity , which is anthropologically, but also and above all philosophically, sensitive. We shall look at the impact of technological devices on the perceptive/cognitive systems of human beings, starting with a reflection on the practices of interaction, signification and interpretation that  also  involve digital objects with a possible impact on everyday life.

Smart objects in daily life: Tackling the rise of new life forms in a semiotic perspective *