Ricerc@Sapienza

The widespread use of voice-activated artificial intelligence technologies (voice assistants) has started to attract the attention of academic researchers in different strands of studies, like marketing and human-computer interaction. As user-voice assistant (VA) dialogues are based on dynamic learning and adaptation algorithms, which collect and process a huge volume of users' personal and behavioural data, marketing scholars are beginning to investigate users' perception of privacy risk related to interactions with VAs. Alongside these studies on negative perceptions, researchers also started to investigate users' positive perceptions, focusing mostly on three types of benefits, i.e., utilitarian, hedonic and symbolic. However, despite the growing interest in perceived risk and benefits in interactions with VAs, the partial theoretical and empirical perspectives adopted do not allow us to grasp a holistic view of users' positive and negative perceptions. In addition, little attention has been given to the context of the smartphone, which is the most used device to dialogue with VAs. Finally, despite VAs are rapidly entering the daily life of all generational groups of users, no scholar has proposed a study across generations with the aim of bringing out perceptual differences. Consequently, our research intends to adopt a multi-method exploratory approach with a three-fold aim: 1) to uncover the risk and benefits perceptions in interactions with VAs on smartphones across users' generations (i.e., Generation Z, Generation Y, Generation X and Baby Boomers); 2) to jointly explore the main dimensions of risk and benefits arising from interactions with VAs on smartphones across generations; and, 3) to identify clusters of users based on perceptual differences in terms of risk and benefits. In the light of these cognitive objectives, data will be collected initially through in-depth interviews and subsequently by administering questionnaires.