Exploring Interactions Between Trust, Anthropomorphism, and Relationship Development in Voice Assistants

TL;DR

This study investigates how users develop social relationships with voice assistants, finding that increased trust and anthropomorphism are linked to relationship development, modeled using human relationship metrics.

Contribution

It demonstrates that human-device interactions can be quantified with social relationship metrics and explores their correlation with trust and anthropomorphism.

Findings

Relationship development correlates with increased trust.

Anthropomorphism increases as relationships deepen.

Human relationship models apply to voice assistant interactions.

Abstract

Modern conversational agents such as Alexa and Google Assistant represent significant progress in speech recognition, natural language processing, and speech synthesis. But as these agents have grown more realistic, concerns have been raised over how their social nature might unconsciously shape our interactions with them. Through a survey of 500 voice assistant users, we explore whether users' relationships with their voice assistants can be quantified using the same metrics as social, interpersonal relationships; as well as if this correlates with how much they trust their devices and the extent to which they anthropomorphise them. Using Knapp's staircase model of human relationships, we find that not only can human-device interactions be modelled in this way, but also that relationship development with voice assistants correlates with increased trust and anthropomorphism.