Hey Alexa! A Magic Spell of Social Glue? Sharing a Smart Voice Assistant Speaker and Its Impact on Users’ Perception of Group Harmony

Unlike most other computing devices that are known to isolate their users, Smart Voice Assistant Speaker (SVAS) appears to improve the perception of social cohesion (i.e., Group Harmony) among its co-users. We hypothesize that the social cues emanated from the continued, and habituated, use of SVAS develop the “illusion of intimacy” which, in turn, ripples through the entire group, and help fulfill the need for social integration. The data collected from 218 families support this hypothesis. We argue that just as a puppy dog contributes to a happy family, so does the SVAS contributes to the social dynamics by making the users unconsciously fulfill their psychological needs and by increasing actual conversations among its users. Incidentally, the study compared the relative influence of three factors (the beta weight of “Hedonic Motivation” being the highest, followed by “Compatibility,” and then “Perceived Security”) that, as a whole, explain over 60% of the variance in Satisfaction of post-adoption SVAS use.