Examining User Experience of Conversational Agents in Hedonic Digital Services – Antecedents and the Role of Psychological Ownership

Abstract

Conversational agents (CA) that interact with users in human language have become increasingly popular over the past years. This study explores antecedents of the user experience with CAs in hedonic digital services, utilizing the example of music streaming services. Moreover, this study investigates whether a positive CA user experience increases users’ sense of psychological ownership towards the service, which in turn is supposed to positively influence users’ intention to use the service’s fee required premium version. Using structural equation modelling, the results indicate that perceived humanness and perceived personalization of the CA positively affect the user experience. The results also show that CAs can greatly benefit from higher humanness and personalization when users trust the hedonic digital service. Furthermore, psychological ownership has been identified as an underlying mechanism through which CA user experience leads to users’ premium usage intention, indicating that CAs might be valuable for hedonic digital services.