Communications of the ACM
Study: Smart Speakers Make Passive Listeners
People explore less when they get recommendations from voice-based platforms such as Amazons Alexa or Apples Siri.
Credit: Cornell Brand Communications
Cornell University researchers investigating the wider ramifications of content discovery with smart speaker products found people who read choices online digested information nine times faster and explored at least three times as much as those who heard them listed by a Siri, Alexa, or similar product.
Recommendation algorithms generally prioritize popular content, with people who read their recommendations less likely to select the most popular or top-rated options.
Said Cornell's Longqi Yang, "With these devices becoming more popular and more people adopting them, this kind of interface becomes very important, because it's one of the major channels for people to be exposed to information."
Yang said these devices could be redesigned to meet this challenge; his team recommended that smart speakers offer top-ranked choices that are diverse, personalized, and frequently changed, giving users access to a broader range of information.
These findings were presented at the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2018) in Vancouver, Canada.
From Cornell Chronicle (NY)
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Abstracts Copyright © 2018 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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