Smart Speakers' Adoption: Technology Acceptance Model and the Role Of
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Department of Business and Management Master’s Degree in Marketing Analytics & Metrics Chair of Marketing Metrics Smart speakers’ adoption: Technology Acceptance Model and the role of Conversational Style Prof. Michele Costabile Prof. Maria Giovanna Devetag SUPERVISOR CO-SUPERVISOR Flavia Pigliacelli ID 712581 CANDIDATE Academic Year 2019/2020 1 A mio padre, tra le cui braccia calde anche l’ultima paura morì. A mia madre, forte e debole compagna. A mia sorella Claudia, vento e magica corrente. Alla mia famiglia, carburante del mio fare e paracadute del mio disfare. 2 “Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.” Winston Churchill 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................................................... 5 CHAPTER ONE ............................................................................................................................................................ 7 1.1 Smart speakers: home voices paving the way to the Internet of Things .......................................................... 7 1.2 Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in voice search: disruptive ingredients for the IoT business revolution ................................................................................................................................................................. 13 1.3 Voice is the new touch: how smart speakers may overturn marketing strategies ........................................ 17 1.4 Missing pieces of the smart speakers’ revolution puzzle ................................................................................ 25 CHAPTER TWO......................................................................................................................................................... 30 2.1 Smart Objects: building blocks of the Internet of Things .............................................................................. 30 2.1.2 Drivers and Barriers of IoT adoption ....................................................................................................... 33 2.1.3 Focus on Smart Speakers: Amazon Alexa and Google Home ................................................................. 36 2.1.4 Smart Home: an application of Virtual Vocal Assistants within a familiar environment ..................... 39 2.2 Conceptual Framework .................................................................................................................................... 41 2.2.1 Theoretical roots of IoT acceptance: a review of Technology Acceptance Model ................................. 44 2.2.2 Leveraging on User Experience induced by Interaction to improve Smart Speakers’ adoption: Pragmatist Aesthetics .......................................................................................................................................... 46 2.2.3 Leveraging on User Experience induced by Interaction to improve Smart Speakers’ adoption: Anthropomorphic cues ........................................................................................................................................ 50 2.2.4 Leveraging on User Experience induced by Interaction to improve Smart Speakers’ adoption: Conversational Style (and its gaps) .................................................................................................................... 54 CHAPTER THREE .................................................................................................................................................... 58 3.1 Conceptual Model: Variables and Hypotheses ................................................................................................ 58 3.2 Research Method: Measures and Data Collection .......................................................................................... 61 3.2.1 Pre-testing Scenarios for Independent and Moderator Variables .......................................................... 61 3.2.2 Main-Test .................................................................................................................................................... 64 3.3 Data Analysis and Findings .............................................................................................................................. 66 3.3.1 Pre-Test Results .......................................................................................................................................... 66 3.3.2 Main-Test Results ....................................................................................................................................... 67 3.3.2.1 Descriptives, Reliability and Validity of the scales, Manipulation Check .......................................... 67 3.3.2.2 Main and Moderation Effects on Perceived Usefulness and Attitude ................................................. 68 3.3.2.3 Linear Regressions of measured variables ............................................................................................ 69 3.3.2.4 Chi-square associations between measured variables .......................................................................... 71 3.4 Sentiment Analysis: Google Home Mini vs Amazon Echo Dot 3rd Generation ............................................. 74 3.5 Main Results Summary ..................................................................................................................................... 77 CONCLUSIONS.......................................................................................................................................................... 78 APPENDIX .................................................................................................................................................................. 82 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................................................... 93 4 INTRODUCTION Internet Of Things, understood as the billions of physical devices around the world connected to the Internet, is being adopted worldwide by almost all sectors. In business and industry, there are several IoT use cases and real-life deployments. In the consumer space there are many thousands of devices and applications for a broad variety of purposes, for using which people do not necessarily need to be experts despite their great and complex technological power. Given that IoT promises to make our environment, our homes and offices smarter, more measurable and social, predictions regarding its economic impact keeps evolving. IoT success is pushing firms to design and deliver new services, raging from product functions regulation to user experience personalisation. Not surprisingly, for consumers, the smart home is probably the place where they are more likely to come into contact with internet-enabled things and represents the principal area where the big tech companies are competing hard. Besides smart bulbs, smart fridges, smart tv and thermostats, smart speakers are the most obvious objects driving this trend since they easily make real and spontaneous the remote control of other items as well as the performance of daily routines through natural language. Explicitly, smart speakers are devices integrated with Virtual Assistants, declensions of Artificial Intelligence, that assure interaction and hands-free activation by means of a wake-word. As such, they are becoming pervasive in homes due to their suitability in readily carrying out voice commands aimed at different use-cases: asking weather forecasts, performing Internet searches, playing media content, shopping online, supervising home automation. Briefly, smart speakers, serving as hubs of a connected lifestyle, are profoundly influencing consumer behavior transformation inside the home. Furthermore, their proliferation is remodelling the way businesses communicate with customers across a variety of spaces. Although smart speakers are sketched to improve efficiency and convenience, as well as comfort and entertainment, usability and accessibility issues are still open questions since these items are not always appreciated and their functionalities are not always thoroughly harnessed. For instance, eMarketer’s predictions about adoption rate have undergone a slight downward adjustment for this year (eMarketer, 2020), signalling that smart speakers usage is not reaping the expected success. Indeed, while sales are rising, ownership largely converges on a minority of households that are generally heaviest users of connected home technologies and does not seem to reach broader portions (Williams, 2020). This circumstance represents a challenge for marketers that are trying to make the voice commerce take-off real and for smart home technologies developers that aspire to expand the market beyond early adopters. Accordingly, companies need to find a way to boost and expand adoption of smart speakers because, beyond everything, they still constitute a hot market on the threshold of their early majority stages of adoption (Olson, 2019; Voicebot, 2019). These initial stages of their lifecycle will eventually have a massive impact on future profits as well as on tech companies’ plan of connecting customers to their ecosystems, whose first executive point rests precisely on home smart