Abstract
Many people use smart speakers at home nowadays for various reasons, such as playing music, checking news and weather, setting timers/alarms, etc. However, before smart speakers were created and available on the market, people used to have home audio systems for similar applications. Nonetheless, the control systems of smart speakers have many different appearances. Affordance is the information given by an object, which is determined by its appearance and supplies clues about its appropriate operation. Therefore, smart speakers should have affordances. Since smart speakers are the main device in the sustainable lifestyle of human beings in smart homes, this study analyzed the affordances of its appearance affect people and the result is essential to the sustainability of smart home. The present study presents a review of the smart speakers in Taiwan, focusing on the four main affordances (physical, cognitive, sensory, functional) and three different age groups (60 participants) based on four appearance categories of smart speaker control, namely, mechanical button control, no-button–no-touch control, touchscreen control, and touch sensor control. By examining the comparison of three age groups, 18–24, 25–49 and 50+, the results of one-way ANOVA showed that the smart speakers with touchscreen control and touch sensor control had a significant difference (p < 0.01) in four main affordances among these three age groups. The smart speakers with mechanical button control and no-button–no-touch control had no significant difference (p > 0.01) in four main affordances among these three age groups. In conclusion, age-range and cultural group affect the affordance of smart home speakers.
Highlights
The ANOVA results showed that this sample has no statistically significant difference (p > 0.01) for all four affordances among the three age groups, which indicates that the null hypothesis cannot be rejected
Norman (1999) explained that cultural constraints are the conventions shared by a cultural group, which can affect how a person operates a device [22]. This present study presents a review of the differences in the affordances of smart speakers among three age groups in Taiwan
The results showed that the middle age group of Taiwanese better understood how to operate a smart speaker compared with other age groups, which might relate to most of them having jobs and a higher income
Summary
People can use smart speakers to listen to music and enjoy different types of entertainment comfortably at home. In the past few decades, people were more familiar with a general home audio system that can play music on vinyl records, cassette tapes, CDs, etc. This original concept began in 1877, when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, which was the first machine in the world that could play music. About 10 years later, in 1887, the disc-spinning turntable was invented by Emil Berliner. This was the first gramophone in the world that could play music [1]. Cheaper phonographs for home use were introduced in 1894, by Columbia, and in 1896, by Edison [2,3]
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