The Impact of Voice Assistants on Effort Saving, Decision Delegation and Satisfaction: An Abstract

TY - CHAP

T1 - The Impact of Voice Assistants on Effort Saving, Decision Delegation and Satisfaction

T2 - An Abstract

AU - Panton, George

AU - Cheng, Zixuan Mia

AU - de Regt, Anouk

AU - Montecchi, Matteo

AU - Plangger, Kirk

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - Artificial Intelligence powered voice assistants (VAs) such as Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, are influencing how customers search for information, consume content, and make purchasing decisions (McLean & Osei-Frimping, 2019). The natural speech commands that customers can use to access content or perform tasks through VAs closely mirror human-to-human interactions (Fernandes & Oliveira, 2021), thus prompting customers to anthropomorphize these technologies (Whang & Im, 2021). Given VAs’ widespread popularity and growing adoption rates, marketers need to understand how to develop voice-enabled brand touchpoints that successfully advertise brands’ value propositions and enhance the customer experience. Against this background, this study examines how customers’ tendency to anthropomorphize VAs impacts the experience of performing a common search, selection, and recommendation tasks such as choosing and playing music. Because decision-making is such an essential part of consumer behavior, it is essential that marketers attempt to understand how such technologies affect the consumer’s decision-making process and how this might impact the field of marketing. To understand how voice assistants impact consumer behavior, this study recruited 309 respondents to participate in an A/B experiment. The result found that those voice assistants with a higher level of anthropomorphism increased effort saving, leading to higher levels of satisfaction. Moreover, we found that people who are already more prone to decision delegation are less influenced by the anthropomorphism of the interface. Our research offers several contributions to the growing literature that explores VAs as brand communication mediums (Bellis & Johar, 2020; Dellaert et al., 2020; Guha et al., 2021; Rust, 2020). First, we examine how VAs’ anthropomorphic nature influences customers’ perceived satisfaction with the output of a search, selection, and recommendation task. Second, we unpack the mechanism behind this effect by showing that VAs increase customers’ perceptions of effort saving. Third, we identify customers’ tendency to delegate as a critical boundary condition of this effect.

AB - Artificial Intelligence powered voice assistants (VAs) such as Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, are influencing how customers search for information, consume content, and make purchasing decisions (McLean & Osei-Frimping, 2019). The natural speech commands that customers can use to access content or perform tasks through VAs closely mirror human-to-human interactions (Fernandes & Oliveira, 2021), thus prompting customers to anthropomorphize these technologies (Whang & Im, 2021). Given VAs’ widespread popularity and growing adoption rates, marketers need to understand how to develop voice-enabled brand touchpoints that successfully advertise brands’ value propositions and enhance the customer experience. Against this background, this study examines how customers’ tendency to anthropomorphize VAs impacts the experience of performing a common search, selection, and recommendation tasks such as choosing and playing music. Because decision-making is such an essential part of consumer behavior, it is essential that marketers attempt to understand how such technologies affect the consumer’s decision-making process and how this might impact the field of marketing. To understand how voice assistants impact consumer behavior, this study recruited 309 respondents to participate in an A/B experiment. The result found that those voice assistants with a higher level of anthropomorphism increased effort saving, leading to higher levels of satisfaction. Moreover, we found that people who are already more prone to decision delegation are less influenced by the anthropomorphism of the interface. Our research offers several contributions to the growing literature that explores VAs as brand communication mediums (Bellis & Johar, 2020; Dellaert et al., 2020; Guha et al., 2021; Rust, 2020). First, we examine how VAs’ anthropomorphic nature influences customers’ perceived satisfaction with the output of a search, selection, and recommendation task. Second, we unpack the mechanism behind this effect by showing that VAs increase customers’ perceptions of effort saving. Third, we identify customers’ tendency to delegate as a critical boundary condition of this effect.

KW - Anthropomorphism

KW - Decision delegation

KW - Effort saving

KW - Voice assistant

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85151289874&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-24687-6_104

DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-24687-6_104

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:85151289874

T3 - Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science

SP - 267

EP - 268

BT - Developments in Marketing Science

PB - Springer Nature

ER -