Voice Assistant Personalities for Health Information Seeking

Sredojev, S. M. and Stumpf, S. (2021) Voice Assistant Personalities for Health Information Seeking. In: ACM IUI 2021 Workshops, 13-17 Apr 2021,

Abstract

As voice assistants become increasingly popular, attention has been drawn to their personalities and their impact on trust and likeability. While it has been found that assistant personalities that matched their users in personality were more trusted and liked in an automotive context, other assistive situations have yet remained unexplored. This study investigates how the personality of a voice assistant impacts user's perceptions of trust and attractiveness in the context of seeking general health information. A voice assistant prototype, consisting of two different assistant personalities, was designed and tested via a Wizard-of-Oz method. We found that personality did not have an impact on trust and system attractiveness in this context, and that instead of affective cues, users paid more attention to cognitive cues in assessing the voice assistant. Our work holds important lessons for designing voice assistants.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Stumpf, Dr Simone
• Authors: Sredojev, S. M., and Stumpf, S.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• ISSN: 1613-0073
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2021 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Proceedings of the ACM IUI 2021 Workshops
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License