How Perceptions of Trust and Intrusiveness Affect the Adoption of Voice Activated Personal Assistants

Voice Activated Personal Assistants (VAPA) are unique and different from other Information
Systems (IS) due to their personalized, intelligent, and human-like behavior. Given the unique characteristics
of these VAPA's, current technology adoption models are not comprehensive enough for explaining the
usage of these systems. While trust and privacy have been identied as relevant issues affecting adoption of
VAPA's, both these have been treated in a simplistic fashion that is not effective keeping in mind the complex
nature of these factors. Moreover, being ``always on'', VAPA's are intrusive by nature: another aspect that
current research has overlooked. Drawing on current ndings in IS and articial intelligence, we propose
two different types of trust (cognitive and emotional) together with their antecedents (anthropomorphism,
intelligence, VAPA privacy concern, household privacy concern, vendor & third-party privacy concern, and
government privacy concern). The moderation effect of perceived intrusiveness on usage behavior is also
examined. The proposed research model is empirically validated with data obtained from 466 VAPA users
in India using a Structure Equation Modelling approach. We observe that perceived anthropomorphism
does not affect emotional trust, whereas the effect of perceived intelligence on cognitive trust is signicant.
Social privacy concerns like VAPA and household privacy affect both forms of trust, whereas the effect of
institutional privacy category is weak with only vendor & third-party privacy concern affecting emotional
trust. Additionally, the ndings establish the moderating role of perceived intrusiveness in dampening and
negatively inuencing the usage of VAPA's, with a stronger effect for large households.