Abstract
The relevance of smart speakers is steadily increasing, allowing users perform several daily tasks. From a commercial perspective, smart speakers also provide recommendations of products and services that may influence the consumer decision-making process. However, previous studies have mainly focused on the adoption of smart speakers, but there is a lack of proper guidelines that help design the way these devices should offer their consumption recommendations. Based on a stimulus-organism-response approach, we analyze how two features of smart speakers' recommendations (the gender congruence between the customer and the speaker, and the length of the message) influence on the effectiveness of such recommendations (i.e., visiting intentions) through its impact on user engagement and attitude. Data was collected from a sample of undergrad students in Spain using an experiment design that focused on a restaurant recommendation, and analyzed using partial least squares. On the one hand, our results suggests that gender congruence generates user engagement with the smart speaker. On the other hand, message length is positively related to attitudes towards the restaurant, at a declining rate. In addition, while better attitudes lead to higher visiting intentions, the influence of engagement on visiting intentions is partially mediated via attitudes. Thus, our findings contribute to understand the antecedents of users' engagement with smart speakers, as well as its impact on the customers' willingness to follow smart speakers' recommendations, constituting a base to analyze the impact of artificial intelligence solutions aimed to smooth the transitions of a customer through the stages of purchase process.
Highlights
Smart speakers help individuals to perform a range of simple tasks in everyday life, such as reporting the weather forecast, switching off the light, or playing music
Since engaged individuals are more likely to develop more favorable attitudes (Vivek et al, 2012), we argue that these engaged customers are expected to have a favorable assessment (Wu and Chen, 2005) toward the recommended restaurant, leading to the following hypothesis: H5: Customer engagement with the smart speaker is positively associated with customer attitude toward the recommended restaurant
We propose that customer engagement with the smart speaker and attitude toward the recommended restaurant influence customer visiting intentions: H6: Customer engagement with the smart speaker is positively associated with the intention to visit the recommended restaurant
Summary
Smart speakers help individuals to perform a range of simple tasks in everyday life, such as reporting the weather forecast, switching off the light, or playing music. They can recommend stores, products, services, etc., fitting customer requirements. These devices based on artificial intelligence have the ability to interact and converse with humans (e.g., Belanche et al, 2020). Customers cannot process voice-based information as efficiently as visual or even text-based information, mostly because of a lack of accuracy and user-system interaction (Lee and Pan, 2010), so smart speakers need to offer engaging recommendations that generate favorable attitudes toward the recommended product or service as well as purchase or visiting intentions
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