Efficacy of Google Assistant and Siri for Female L2 Learners with Regional Accents

This paper examines the effectiveness of Google Assistant and Siri in understanding the accented speech of nonnative English-speaking women whose first languages are Hindi, Malayalam, and Tamil. It considers how well these assistants performed in terms of user satisfaction, perceived usefulness, responsiveness, and degree of accentedness using the Stimulus-Organism-Response framework. The results show that while Google Assistant outperformed its opponent in perceived usefulness and responsiveness, its variability drags down user satisfaction. Despite showing lower functionality, Siri achieves high satisfaction due to its consistent performance. Based on this finding, it is evident that emotional involvement and clarity are critical antecedents of preference and intention to continue using.