Smart Speaker Recommendations: Impact of Gender Congruence and Amount of Information on Users' Engagement and Choice

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.

Exploring the Role of Norms and Habit in Explaining Pro-Environmental Behavior Intentions in Situations of Use Robots and AI Agents as Providers in Tourism Sector

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Enhancing visit intention in heritage tourism: The role of object‐based and existential authenticity in non‐immersive virtual reality heritage experiences

“…Cognitive response has been considered, since the early years of marketing theory, as a fundamental variable to understand how consumers respond to a stimulus (e.g., advertising or other product/service‐related information; Oliver, 1980; Wirtz et al, 2000). Research in psychology, marketing and tourism demonstrated that cognitive responses also affect a consumer's emotional state, place attachment, satisfaction and behavioral intentions (Bagozzi, 1992; Dillard & Peck, 2000; Lazarus, 1991; Loureiro, Guerreiro, et al, 2021; Romero et al, 2021; Wakefield & Blodgett, 1999; Zheng et al, 2019). In the restaurant sector, Ladhari et al (2008) and Kim and Moon (2009) found that cognitive response to service quality leads to positive emotions.…”

Transitioning to online learning in higher education: Influence of Awareness of COVID-19 and Self-Efficacy on Perceived Net Benefits and Intention

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