User Perceptions of an Intelligent Personal Assistant's Personality: The Role of Interaction Context

Image: Alexa Personality Collage, by Diedre Brown 2021

Image: Alexa Personality Collage, by Diedre Brown 2021

Have you ever wondered if your perception of your Alexa and the information you received from it is shaped by the situation you’re in?

As a graduate assistant for Dr. Irene Lopatovska, I have participated in human-computer interaction research devoted to understanding perceptions of personality of intelligent personal assistants, like Amazon Alexa.

Our paper, User Perceptions of an Intelligent Personal Assistant’s Personality was published in the 6th ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction & Retrieval #chiir2021. Use the links below to watch our presentation or to read the paper.

 
 

Abstract: This paper reports on an experimental study that examined user perceptions of Amazon Alexa’s personality, as well as influences of stressful or non-stressful interactions on personality perceptions. The study relied on the Five-Factor Model and the Stereotype Content Model personality frameworks. An online data collection instrument was designed to give Alexa’s users (N=50) stressful and non-stressful tasks followed by questions related to Alexa’s personality. The assumption was that stressful and non-stressful tasks would frame a user’s preference for Alexa’s personality. Quantitative data of the participants’ ratings of Alexa’s responses, and qualitative comments about their ratings, experiences, and thoughts about Alexa were collected and analyzed using descriptive statistics, tests of association, and thematic content analysis. The findings indicated that while the majority of users appreciate Alexa’s personality as a way of making interactions more personal and enjoyable, some users prefer their conversational agent to be efficient, robotic-like, and devoid of a personality that might cause attachment. The participants described Alexa as competent in terms of information content and usability, and warm in terms of its personality manifestation, but wantedtheir ideal Alexa to be even more competent and warm. After experiencing stressful and non-stressful experimental conditions, the participants appreciated Alexa’s highly competent and highly warm responses, while disparaging low-warmth/high-competence responses. The participants’ comments indicated that after stressful tasks, they were more generous in their assessment of Alexa’s performance, and valued manifestations of Alexa’s warmth higher than after non-stressful tasks. Additionally, after the second group of tasks/towards the end of the study, the participants tended to score low warmth/high competence responses higher, which might indicate a slight preference for competence after longer interactions or a user’s fatigued state. The implications of the findings on the design of conversational interfaces and study limitations are discussed.