Measuring Users’ Trust in VIA Responses: The Age and Response Forms Perspective

Abstract When interacting with voice intelligent assistants (VIAs), users of different age groups usually react differently to the devices’ responses. This research focused on two influencing factors of users’ trust—user age and VIA response forms, and devised an experiment followed up with voluntary semi-structured interviews with 100 younger adult users (aged 22 to 59), 100 older adult users (aged 66 to 79) and 100 child users (aged 6 to11) to (i) quantify the varying degrees of trust across distinct age groups in the different presentation forms used to convey the same response content from VIAs, (ii) identify how the type of question posed influences on the levels of trust exhibited by users of different age groups in VIA response forms and (iii) explore the underlying rationales and motivations behind user perceptions and attitudes towards the diverse presentation forms of VIA responses, accounting for variations across different age demographics. In this paper, seven VIA response forms was studied, i.e. picture, text, hyperlink, ‘picture + text’, ‘picture + hyperlink’, ‘text + hyperlink’, and ‘picture + text + hyperlink’. Results indicate that users from different age groups demonstrate varying degrees of trust in the same responses when presented in different forms, expanding the research on users’ trust from the distinctive perspectives of user ages and response forms, while providing manufacturers with insights into consumer psychology.