Consumer acceptance of voice-activated smart home devices for product information seeking and online ordering

Highlights

• Consumers like the convenience of voice-activated smart home devices (SHDs).

• We explore how opinion seeking and SHD utility impact voice-activated ordering.

• Hedonic attitude toward voice and device utility are primary drivers of SHD ordering.

• Facilitating conditions supporting use of SHDs are more important for men than women.

• For Millennials, choice confusion is a significant influencer of SHD device utility.

Abstract

This paper explores how voice-activated smart home devices (SHDs) like Amazon Alexa and Google Home influence consumers' retail information seeking and ordering behaviors. The impacts of device utility and hedonic perceptions of voice are examined in an extension of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The authors augment existing principles of technology acceptance theories by adding specific drivers of opinion-seeking behavior to better comprehend consumers’ perceptions of device utility for online retail activity. Both gender and generation were found to influence consumer intentions to use SHDs for online ordering of products. A rationale for future research on consumer interaction with SHDs is offered.

Introduction

Smart home devices (SHDs) like Amazon Alexa and Google Home are multi-use tools much like the smart mobile phone that allow the user to perform everyday functions. Consumers can request information and listen to music using voice commands. According to National Public Radio (2020), 24% of Americans currently own a SHD, which equals 60 million adults with an average of over two devices per home. Analysts predict that 15% of homes worldwide will have a smart home device by 2023 (Albondi & Narcotta, 2019). Given this explosive global growth, this paper explores how SHDs impact consumers’ retail information seeking and ordering decisions. The major purpose of this study is to examine the effects of selected technology acceptance variables and consumer shopping attitudes and styles on intention to use SHDs to order goods and services.

Voice facilitates an improved consumer experience (Daugherty et al., 2018; Shaoolian, 2018). As an input mechanism, spoken language is natural and convenient compared to touch typing on a keyboard or phone. Widely-recognized voice-activated assistant options include Siri, Google Now, S Voice, Cortana, and Alexa (Coskun-Setirek & Mardikyan, 2017). Amazon's Alexa voice assistant is installed in over 100 million devices (Stockler, 2019); Google's is in over one billion devices (Shukla, 2019). Amazon Alexa is now standard in new models of Cadillac, Chevy, Buick and GMC Vehicles (Perez, 2019).

SHDs are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), which refers to the systems, algorithms and programs that show intelligence and move voice beyond basic speech recognition and synthesis to promote more natural user/device exchanges. Improvements in conversational interfaces have made voice-activated devices more desirable to consumers (Libai et al., 2020). McTear, Callejas, and Griol (2016) describe conversational interface as ‘technology that supports conversational interaction with virtual personal assistants by means of speech or other modalities’ (p. 11). Speech recognition and voice identification accuracy has grown from 80% in 2010 to 95% in 2018 (Shankar, 2018).

Consumers are buying smart home devices to solve simple problems. Consumers like the convenience of asking a voice-activated device about the day's weather, to play their favorite song or order paper towels. Daily usage of these voice-activated devices had reached 65–72 min a day (Nielsen, 2018) providing firms with growing access to consumers. Multiple daily commands increased 5% in 2020 alone, conceivably impacted by the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders (Schwartz, 2020). By comparison, the typical smartphone user spends 171 min a day, with 76 of those on the top five social media apps (Mormone, 2019). DBS Interactive (2019) notes the growing adoption of voice-activated services within business settings, e.g., hotels and banks, which reinforces the commercial extension of these SHDs.

Voice technology has the potential to alter how consumers are shopping on the Internet (Shankar, 2018). Such technology has greatly impacted the customer journey by supporting consumers’ cognitive, sensory, and social activities (Hoyer, Kroschke, Schmitt, Kraume, & Shankar, 2020; Kexel, Osterloh, & Hanel, 2020). Enhancement of the consumer experience is increasingly important in retailing (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016). García-Serrano, Martı́nez, and Hernández (2004) note that voice artificial intelligence can be used during information searches to provide the right information to the consumer based on user-to-device dialogue. Voice search is defined as the systems that provide information based on a spoken query (Wang, Yu, Ju, & Acero, 2008). Over 80% of voice users stated they would use SHD devices to search for local businesses (Murphy, 2018).

Consumers already rely on an expanded mix of tactics to order products and services online. For example, Domino's launched its AI voice-ordering ‘Dom’ system in 2018 to process phone orders (Williams, 2018). There are 15 ways to order a pizza, such as using smart phones, smart TVs or even deploying a pizza emoji on social media (Clarke, 2018). Voice-activated smart home devices can complement existing ordering methods. However, there is little data to substantiate retail strategy around the use of SHDs for online ordering.

This study is positioned to offer additional insights to retailers and researchers regarding consumer opinion of SHDs for online purchasing. A study of voice-ordering intentions is timely and justified on the basis of the increasing popularity and purchase of Alexa and Google Home SHDs. Smart objects possess their own distinctive capacities and promote unique interactions with consumers that need to be investigated (Hoffman & Novak, 2018). It is more than likely that SHDs will be added to the mix of technologies useful to consumer online purchase. Kinsella (2019) argues that the use of SHDs is a significant paradigm shift in consumer shopping comparable to the introduction of the Internet and smart phone.

This paper follows previous work in this journal and in the greater e-commerce literature in order to situate the study appropriately and make unique contributions to the technology adoption field. Despite a growing body of research about the design and use of smart home devices, existing work has mainly focused on their use for entertainment, basic information search, or smart home controls. Less is known about consumer use of these devices in e-commerce activity. The authors apply extant literature on adoption of technologies for online purchasing to research this issue. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. First, the literature and theoretical concepts that are central to this study are reviewed and a model is formulated to depict relationships between driving factors and intention to order online using voice-activated SHDs. This is followed by the presentation of research methodology and results of data analysis. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing findings, implications, and future research directions.