Enthusiasts, Pragmatists, and Skeptics: Investigating Users’ Attitudes Towards Emotion- and Personality-Aware Voice Assistants across Cultures

Abstract

Voice Assistants (VAs) are becoming a regular part of our daily life. They are embedded in our smartphones or smart home devices. Just as natural language processing has improved the conversation with VAs, ongoing work in speech emotion recognition also suggests that VAs will soon become emotion- and personality-aware. However, the social implications, ethical borders and the users’ general attitude towards such VAs remain underexplored. In this paper, we investigate users’ attitudes towards and preferences for emotionally aware VAs in three different cultures. We conducted an online questionnaire with N = 364 participants in Germany, China, and Egypt to identify differences and similarities in attitudes. Using a cluster analysis, we identified three different basic user types (Enthusiasts, Pragmatists, and Skeptics), which exist in all cultures. We contribute characteristic properties of these user types and highlight how future VAs should support customizable interactions to enhance user experience across cultures.