Exploring Interactions Between Trust, Anthropomorphism, and Relationship Development in Voice Assistants
This addresses concerns about how social interactions with voice assistants affect user behavior, but it is incremental as it applies existing relationship models to a new context.
The study tackled the problem of quantifying human relationships with voice assistants using social metrics, finding through a survey of 500 users that interactions can be modeled with Knapp's staircase model and correlate with increased trust and anthropomorphism.
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.