Exploring Interactions between Trust, Anthropomorphism, and Relationship Development in Voice Assistants

TY - JOUR

T1 - Exploring Interactions between Trust, Anthropomorphism, and Relationship Development in Voice Assistants

AU - Seymour, William

AU - Van Kleek, Max

N1 - Funding Information: This work was funded by the PETRAS IoT in the Home Project through grant N02334X/1 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 ACM.

PY - 2021/10/13

Y1 - 2021/10/13

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - anthropomorphism

KW - relationship development

KW - trust

KW - voice assistants

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85117883291&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3479515

DO - 10.1145/3479515

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85117883291

SN - 2573-0142

VL - 5

SP - 1

EP - 16

JO - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

JF - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

IS - CSCW2

M1 - 371

ER -