Media richness and adoption intention of voice assistants: a cross-cultural study

Abstract

This study investigates how voice assistants' responses influence customer engagement with voice assistant providers. Voice assistants have been developed by different cultures and countries and include different cultural characteristics. Most voice assistant providers focus on language localisation, but this is not enough. In fact, customer engagement with a voice assistant provider will be significantly affected by different consumer purposes. Users expect voice assistants to provide different levels of media richness for different purposes. An experiment (327 participants from Taiwan and the UK) reveals that British people prefer low media richness when their intentions are transactional and high media richness when their intentions are non-transactional. On the other hand, Taiwanese people prefer high media richness when their intentions are transactional and low media richness when their intentions are non-transactional. Overall, the findings give media richness theory a new interpretation that is applied to voice assistants, and also gives voice assistant providers a cross-cultural insight.