Effects of smart virtual assistants’ characteristics

Hintergrund

Smart virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and the Google Assistant have become increasingly popular in recent years. Increasing connectivity and advances in communication design have allowed digital assistants to perform more and more tasks and be available in virtually all areas of life. The possibilities range from the simple playback of a music playlist to the complete control all electronic devices in homes. Especially with smartphones and smart speakers, the control by voice input has been helpful. It is up to developers, how these artificial avatars ultimately interact with the user. It is unclear how the properties of virtual assistants affect users. In particular, it can be assumed that the gender of the assistant also affects the perception and behavior of users.

Zielsetzung der Arbeit

In the course of the bachelor thesis, the effects of the characteristics and gender of smart virtual assistants on the users will be analyzed. Based on a study the influence of characteristics of assistants on the perception of users should be shown.

Konkrete Aufgaben

Literature research

Related works

Study design

Study conduct

Evaluation of study results

Erwartete Vorkenntnisse

Experience with User Interfaces and Conversational Design

Weiterführende Quellen

McTear, M., Callejas, Z., Griol, D. (2016). The Conversational Interface. Springer International Publishing.

Hannon, C. (2016). Gender and status in voice user interfaces. ACM.

Pearl, C. (2016). Designing Voice User Interfaces: Principles of Conversational Experiences. O’Reilly.