‘Hey Alexa, Let's Shop’: A Study of Voice-Activated Assistants Experiences

As the market of voice-activated assistants (VAAs) is rapidly expanding, these voice-based interfaces, as easy and intuitive conversational agents, are penetrating people's everyday life. To add new insight into the current understanding of this phenomenon, this study aims to explore consumers’ experiences and perceptions with VAAs for apparel shopping along with the shopping journey. This qualitative study uses semistructured interviews with 21 US-based participants who have shopped using VAAs. The phronetic iterative method identified six main themes: perceived VAA suitability for apparel, loyalty-driven VAA shopping, VAA personal assistant experiences, ecosystem credibility experiences, control and autonomy in VAA shopping, and desire for multi-modal shopping. Further, perceived benefits and barriers relating to each theme are discussed. Our findings lay a foundation for the theorization of consumer behavior while providing implications on marketing and design of voice commerce for fashion businesses and VAA developers.