How Users Reciprocate to Alexa

Abstract

With the launch of Siri, a conversational assistant presented by Apple in 2011, voice-enabled personal assistants have since been accessible to the masses (Hoy 2018). As speech is the main channel for communication between humans (Flanagan 1972; Schafer 1995) and is considered to be an innate human behavior (Pinker 1994), interacting with a voice interface is intuitive (Cohen, Giangola and Balogh 2004). Studies conducted under the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm indicate that speech-output and interactivity are two main factors to elicit social reactions in users (Nass et al. 1993). Users adopt human principles like reciprocity and team affiliation when interacting with computers (Nass and Moon 2000). As voice assistants are able to send social cues we assumed that subjects will show social reactions towards an Amazon Echo. Focussing on the social norm of reciprocity, we measured if people provide more help to the assistant after being told that they are interdependent of each other when compared to being independent.