The Impact of Perceived Tone, Age, and Gender on Voice Assistant Persuasiveness in the Context of Product Recommendations
Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University
How they used Delve
Researchers at Indiana University used Delve to code open-ended responses and identify themes in a CUI 2024 study of whether a voice assistant's tone makes it more persuasive, building the codebook collectively through weekly meetings before coding the rest of the data.
“We used Delve for coding the responses and identifying the themes. Initially, the researchers developed a code book for codes in an iterative bottom-up approach by weekly meetings.”
- Field
- Conversational user interfaces / voice assistant persuasion in online shopping
- Data
- Open-ended responses from a Prolific study of 350 invited participants, 335 of whom passed attention checks, reacting to voice assistant tones in an online shopping scenario
- Approach
- Bottom-up thematic analysis of open-ended responses alongside a between-subjects ANOVA design: the researchers built a codebook iteratively through weekly meetings, coded the remaining responses against it, then drew main themes from the codes. Intercoder reliability was deliberately not computed
- Data types
- Open-ended survey responses
Abstract
Voice Assistants (VAs) can assist users in various everyday tasks, but many users are reluctant to rely on VAs for intricate tasks like online shopping. This study aims to examine whether the vocal characteristics of VAs can serve as an effective tool to persuade users and increase user engagement with VAs in online shopping. Prior studies have demonstrated that the perceived tone, age, and gender of a voice influence the perceived persuasiveness of the speaker in interpersonal interactions. Furthermore, persuasion in product communication has been shown to affect purchase decisions in online shopping. We investigate whether variations in a VA voice’s perceived tone, age, and gender characteristics can persuade users and ultimately affect their purchase decisions. Our experimental study showed that participants were more persuaded to make purchase decisions by VA voices having positive or neutral tones as well as middle-aged male or younger female voices. Our results suggest that VA designers should offer users the ability to easily customize VA voices with a range of tones, ages, and genders. This customization can enhance user comfort and enjoyment, potentially leading to higher engagement with VAs. Additionally, we discuss the boundaries of ethical persuasion, emphasizing the importance of safeguarding users’ interests against unwarranted manipulation.
Citation
Sabid Bin Habib Pias, Ran Huang, Donald S. Williamson, Minjeong Kim, Apu Kapadia (2024). The Impact of Perceived Tone, Age, and Gender on Voice Assistant Persuasiveness in the Context of Product Recommendations. ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI '24). https://doi.org/10.1145/3640794.3665545