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Can Smart Voice Assistant Induce Social Facilitation Effect? A Preliminary Study

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Cross-Cultural Design. User Experience of Products, Services, and Intelligent Environments (HCII 2020)

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Abstract

The present study investigated whether a smart voice assistant can induce social facilitation effect. We designed a 3 (social presence: alone, smart voice assistant, human assistant) × 2 (task difficulty: easy, difficult) within-subject experiment. Sixteen university students participated in the experiment. The results showed that a smart voice assistant could induce social facilitation effect when participants performed modular arithmetic tasks, i.e., the response time of easy tasks was shortened while that of difficult tasks was lengthened. No significant difference in accuracy rates was found among three social presence conditions. Intensities of social facilitation effect between smart voice assistant present and human assistant present showed similar strength. These findings provide practical implications in designing work organization modes involving smart voice assistants.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants from Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 71901033), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (Project No. 9204029) and Chinese Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Project No. 2482019RC43).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China

    Na Liu & Quanlin Pu

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  1. Na Liu
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  2. Quanlin Pu
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Correspondence to Na Liu .

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  1. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Pei-Luen Patrick Rau

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Liu, N., Pu, Q. (2020). Can Smart Voice Assistant Induce Social Facilitation Effect? A Preliminary Study. In: Rau, PL. (eds) Cross-Cultural Design. User Experience of Products, Services, and Intelligent Environments. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12192. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49788-0_47

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49788-0_47

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-49787-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-49788-0

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