线上学术 | 市场营销学系讲座（2023-06-27）

Marketing Webinar

(2023-15)

Topic: Your Request is My Command! How Initiation Modalities Shape Conversational AI Experiences

Speaker: Christian Hildebrand, University of St.Gallen 

Time: Tuesday, June 27, 4:00-5:30 p.m. Beijing Time

Location: Zoom Meeting

Abstract

Despite the rapid growth of voice-enabled devices in the consumer-technology landscape, the actual user experience has been mixed. Limited conversational ability leads to enhanced user frustrations and consumer perceptions that voice assistants are mechanical and cold. The current work provides a new lens to study consumer voice-technology interactions, illuminating the largely unexplored role of how initiation modalities shape the user experience. We use a novel methodological approach to study consumer-voice technology interactions that leverages recent advances in voice analytics. We demonstrate that although short, syntactically reduced commands are the dominant way of interacting with digital voice assistants, the use of longer, syntactically enhanced requests promote a more natural interaction experience with the device. Our approach demonstrates that the degree of naturalness consumers experience as a function of the initiation modality is detectable by objective changes in their speech patterns. These patterns reveal that the reduced naturalness when using commands (vs. requests) is reflected by a more staccato-like speech pattern with increased vocal breaks, loudness, and vocal entropy. We find that the more positive interaction experiences produced by requests elicit more positive task evaluations with important downstream consequences including more positive word-of-mouth, more positive device ratings, and the envisioning of a broader range of tasks with the device in the future. The current work represents a critical early step in illuminating how conversational design choices of voice-enabled devices impact consumers’ experiences with emerging voice technologies in the marketplace.

Introduction

Christian Hildebrand is Full Professor of Marketing Analytics and Director of the Institute of Behavioral Science and Technology (IBT) at the University of St. Gallen. He had doctoral and post-doctoral visits at Stanford University, Duke University, and the University of Michigan.

His work is at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and consumer decision making, and explores how new technologies change how people think, act, and make decisions. His research focuses on understanding and optimizing consumer-firm interfaces with an emphasis on digital voice assistants, chatbots, and mobile devices. His research combines classic and novel methodologies from large-scale field experiments to feature-extraction from voice, image, and text data.

His research has been published in leading academic and practitioner-oriented journals at the intersection of marketing and information systems such as Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Marketing Letters, and Harvard Business Review. His work received various research awards including the “Rigor and Relevance Award” of the Swiss Academy of Marketing Science, has been funded by major public and private institutions, and made accessible for the general public through practitioner-oriented special issues such as “The Machine Age of Marketing” of the NIM Marketing Intelligence Review.

Your participation is warmly welcomed!