“Hey Speaker - Why Should I Use You?”
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“HEY SPEAKER - WHY SHOULD I USE YOU?” Exploring the user acceptance of smart speakers by Jonas Hoffmann and Kasper Thuesen Master’s Thesis Business Administration and Information Systems, E-Business Supervision: Ather Nawaz Date of submission: 17th of September 2018 Character count: 222.376 / 97.7 pages Kasper Thuesen, 107905, [email protected] Jonas Hoffmann, 107594, [email protected] Abstract Voice-assistant powered smart speakers are entering private homes by storm, with the purpose of facilitating everyday tasks and simplifying their users’ lives. At the same time, they bring along an array of new challenges due to their purely voice-based interface and their fixed location inside the heart of consumer homes. Motivated by the soaring success of the technology and backed by literature about technology acceptance and user experience, this research investigates what motivates users to continuously use smart speakers in their daily lives and what makes them stop using them. In addition, it explores the gap between expectation and experience for this technology and analyses its influence on smart speaker usage. The research is carried out in two steps. First, 10 selected users are provided with a smart speaker with the task of using the product over the course of four weeks. Consequently, a focus group and several in-depth interviews are conducted with the participants about their experience. The analysis reveals that Usability, Usefulness and Sociality – each consisting of several sub- components – are the main factors that affect smart speaker usage. This research depicts one of the first user-centered analyses of smart speaker usage and opens a door for future research in the area of smart speakers. Keywords: Smart Speakers; Voice Assistants; Technology Acceptance; User Experience; Gulf of Expectation and Evaluation 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The completion of this master thesis depicts the end of our academical journey. Countless hours of late night studies, reading academic articles, writing scientific papers and delivering presentations lie behind us now. While we will miss the inspirational and exciting time we had during all of our studies and especially at CBS, we are just as thrilled to begin a new chapter in our lives. We would like to take the opportunity to thank a number of people. Firstly, we would like to thank our supervisor Ather Nawaz who was excited about our topic and eager to support us right from the beginning. Thank you for always having an open ear and helping us throughout the completion of the paper. We would also like to thank all of our participants for taking part in this research and being just as excited and open minded as we were. With your help we were able to gather valuable first-hand insights and without it we could never have finished this thesis. Finally, we would like to thank our parents, siblings, girlfriends, friends and roommates for bearing with us during the ups and downs of this thesis. From the bottom of our hearts - Thank you! Copenhagen, 17.09.2018 2 Table of contents 1 Introduction 7 1.1 Motivation and Problem Statement 7 1.2 Research Objective and Question 9 2 Limitations 10 3 Research philosophy 11 3.1 Research Paradigm 11 3.3 Ontology 12 3.4 Epistemology 13 4 Literature Review 14 4.1 Voice Assistants 14 4.2 Smart Speakers 16 4.2.1 Alexa & Echo Dot 17 4.2.2 Assistant & Home Mini 17 4.2.3 Recent Smart Speaker Developments 18 4.3 Technology Acceptance 19 4.4 User Experience 26 4.5 Acceptance of Voice Assistants 30 5 Methodology 35 5.1 Research Approach 35 5.2 Research Strategy 35 5.3 Population and Sampling 37 5.3.1 Population 37 5.3.2 Sample 38 5.3.4 Participants 39 5.4 User Tests 39 5.6 Data Collecting 40 5.6.1 Pre-use Interviews 40 5.6.2 Post-use Interviews 41 5.6 Processing the data 44 5.6.1 Thematic Network analysis 44 6 Analysis 46 6.1 Pre-test Network Analysis 47 6.1.1 Expectation 47 3 6.1.2 Influencing Variables 50 6.2 Post-test Network Analysis 53 6.2.1 Sociality 54 6.2.2 Usability 56 6.2.3 Data Privacy 60 6.2.4 Price 61 6.2.5 Hedonics 62 6.2.6 Usefulness 64 6.2.7 Interconnections of post-test network themes 70 7 Discussion 71 7.1 The Factors 71 7.2 Links to TAM and UX-models 76 7.3 Expectation vs. Experience 79 7.4 Industry Developments 80 7.5 Recommendations 82 8 Conclusion 83 Bibliography 85 Appendix 1 92 Appendix 2 96 Appendix 3 100 Appendix 4 103 Appendix 5 106 Appendix 6 110 Appendix 7 114 Appendix 8 117 Appendix 9 121 Appendix 10 125 Appendix 11 129 Appendix 12 154 Appendix 13 158 Appendix 14 164 Appendix 15 169 Appendix 16 174 Appendix 17 178 4 Appendix 18 180 5 List of Tables Figure 1: Gartner’s 2017 Hype Cycle (source: gartner.com, 2017) Figure 2: Amazon’s Echo Dot (source: amazon.com) Figure 3: Google’s Home Mini (source: bestbuy.com) Figure 4: Technology Acceptance Model, in this paper ‘TAM1’ (source: Davis, Bagozzi & Warshaw, 1989) Figure 5: The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, in this paper the ‘UTAUT2’ (source: Venkatesh, Thong & Xu, 2012) Figure 6: The User Perspective on Interaction Model (source: Hassenzahl, 2003) Figure 7: Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb (source: semanticstudios.com) Figure 8: Don Norman’s Gulf of Execution and Evaluation (source: nngroup.com) Figure 9: Thematic Network of possible variables identified in the interview Figure 10: Thematic Network of variables influencing the use of smart speaker List of Figures Table 1: Research participants 6 1 Introduction Ever since the invention of the mechanical computer, mankind has witnessed an unprecedented speed of technological development. Whilst computing power has come from solving simple tasks with enormous efforts to computing complex matters in split seconds, consumers have also seen a constant change of interfaces that make human-machine interaction possible. After the very early popularity of batch and command line interfaces, which made use of punch cards or paper tape, the graphical user interface has dominated ever since while presenting ever-evolving designs, applications, and interaction styles over time. Lately – fueled by jumping developments in the fields of machine learning and natural language processing – voice has emerged as a serious contestor for becoming the main means by which human beings interact with computers in the future. Due to its direct, effortless, intuitive, flexible and sophisticated nature, voice makes it possible to trigger and control complex tasks, and it is thus likely that “spoken dialogue interfaces will become the future gateway to many key services” (Luger & Sellen, 2016: 5286). Recently, voice interfaces have emerged in the market in a variety of forms with intelligent personal voice assistants being one of the most popular. The first voice assistant that had a very prominent appearance was Siri – built into the Apple iPhone in 2011. Several other players, such as Google and Samsung, followed the lead and created similar assistants for their respective smartphones. The purpose of it was to assist users with simple tasks during everyday situations where the users could not use their hands, e.g. while driving or cooking. Such tasks included asking for the weather, calling a friend from the users contact list, or setting a timer. Initially built for smartphones, almost all big players in the industry have quickly turned their attention to other media devices such as notebooks and smart watches and are further looking into integrating voice assistants into home devices and appliances. At the very forefront of popularity of voice assistant powered devices are smart speakers, which some claim will take a central place in future homes where everything is interconnected. 1.1 Motivation and Problem Statement The smart speaker market is booming, and sales forecasts of smart speakers are showing extraordinary figures. According to a report from Global Market Insights (2017), the smart speaker market is expected to grow by an exponential growth rate of 20% from 2018 to 2024 with a predicted end-user spending of 2,1 billion USD worldwide in 2020 (Ann Forni & Van der Meulen, 2016). According to Gautier (2016), companies will exploit this new form of interface by selling compatible products and positive externalities such as voice commerce, media services, advertisements, and sales of new levels of user data will thrive. Looking at Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies from 2017, virtual assistants (voice assistants) have just reached the peak of the hype and are said to reach the plateau of 7 productivity within five to 10 years from now. At the same time, connected homes are also said to be at their peak of hype while reaching the plateau of productivity within the same time frame. This indicates that these two trends go hand in hand or at least correlate in some way (Gartner, 2017). With smart speakers at the forefront of voice assistant technology, the hype cycle suggests that companies as well as end users really see the potential of smart speakers as a new interface for human computer interaction. Figure 1: Gartner’s 2017 Hype Cycle (source: gartner.com, 2017) Considering the limited amount of papers revolving around the acceptance of voice assistants (Luger & Sellen, 2016; Coskun-Setirek & Mardikyan, 2017; Mallat, Tuunainen, Wittkowski, 2017), and understanding that none of these studies are committed to smart speakers, we argue that such study will hit two birds with one stone, especially considering the fact that smart speakers are arguably different from other technologies that research has addressed previously.