TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wienrich, Carolin
A1  - Carolus, Astrid
A1  - Markus, André
A1  - Augustin, Yannik
A1  - Pfister, Jan
A1  - Hotho, Andreas
T1  - Long-term effects of perceived friendship with intelligent voice assistants on usage behavior, user experience, and social perceptions
JF  - Computers
N2  - Social patterns and roles can develop when users talk to intelligent voice assistants (IVAs) daily. The current study investigates whether users assign different roles to devices and how this affects their usage behavior, user experience, and social perceptions. Since social roles take time to establish, we equipped 106 participants with Alexa or Google assistants and some smart home devices and observed their interactions for nine months. We analyzed diverse subjective (questionnaire) and objective data (interaction data). By combining social science and data science analyses, we identified two distinct clusters—users who assigned a friendship role to IVAs over time and users who did not. Interestingly, these clusters exhibited significant differences in their usage behavior, user experience, and social perceptions of the devices. For example, participants who assigned a role to IVAs attributed more friendship to them used them more frequently, reported more enjoyment during interactions, and perceived more empathy for IVAs. In addition, these users had distinct personal requirements, for example, they reported more loneliness. This study provides valuable insights into the role-specific effects and consequences of voice assistants. Recent developments in conversational language models such as ChatGPT suggest that the findings of this study could make an important contribution to the design of dialogic human–AI interactions.
KW  - intelligent voice assistant
KW  - smart speaker
KW  - social relationship
KW  - social role
KW  - long-term analysis
KW  - social interaction
KW  - human–computer interaction
KW  - anthropomorphism
Y1  - 2023
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-313552
SN  - 2073-431X
VL  - 12
IS  - 4
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Carolus, Astrid
A1  - Wienrich, Carolin
A1  - Törke, Anna
A1  - Friedel, Tobias
A1  - Schwietering, Christian
A1  - Sperzel, Mareike
T1  - ‘Alexa, I feel for you!’ Observers’ empathetic reactions towards a conversational agent
JF  - Frontiers in Computer Science
N2  - Conversational agents and smart speakers have grown in popularity offering a variety of options for use, which are available through intuitive speech operation. In contrast to the standard dyad of a single user and a device, voice-controlled operations can be observed by further attendees resulting in new, more social usage scenarios. Referring to the concept of ‘media equation’ and to research on the idea of ‘computers as social actors,’ which describes the potential of technology to trigger emotional reactions in users, this paper asks for the capacity of smart speakers to elicit empathy in observers of interactions. In a 2 × 2 online experiment, 140 participants watched a video of a man talking to an Amazon Echo either rudely or neutrally (factor 1), addressing it as ‘Alexa’ or ‘Computer’ (factor 2). Controlling for participants’ trait empathy, the rude treatment results in participants’ significantly higher ratings of empathy with the device, compared to the neutral treatment. The form of address had no significant effect. Results were independent of the participants’ gender and usage experience indicating a rather universal effect, which confirms the basic idea of the media equation. Implications for users, developers and researchers were discussed in the light of (future) omnipresent voice-based technology interaction scenarios.
KW  - conversational agent
KW  - empathy
KW  - smart speaker
KW  - media equation
KW  - computers as social actors
KW  - human-computer interaction
Y1  - 2021
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-258807
VL  - 3
ER  -