More Than Words: The Impact of Voice Assistant Personality Traits on Failure Mitigation

The influence of voice assistants' inherent characteristics and personality cues on human empathy remains an underexplored research area. This study investigates how manipulating voice assistants' perceived age and failure responses impact user empathy as a failure recovery mechanism, with a special focus on gender differences. Previous research shows that empathy can mitigate user frustration, reduce aggressive behavior, and promote respectful and constructive interactions with technology. To explore this, we conducted a mixed-methods study with 60 participants interacting with a voice assistant prototype designed to fail in most interactions. Our analysis reveals that users exhibit higher empathy toward voice assistants perceived as older, with a comparatively higher impact on males. Additionally, our findings reveal that humor leads to higher empathy, more pronounced in females. In contrast, ignoring failures lowers empathy, trust, and service recovery satisfaction overall. Our study demonstrates that tailoring perceived age and failure response styles of voice assistants can significantly impact users' empathy and subsequent interaction quality, highlighting the potential for these insights to guide the development of more empathetic and user-friendly voice assistants.