The Adoption of Smart Personal Assistants in Education: The Case of Croatian Primary School Teachers

Smart personal assistants (SPAs, such as Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant or Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana,…), also known as intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), are voice-controlled and interactive technologies that are deployed in cell phones and can perform tasks for a person in different environments. This innovative technology has the potential to be used for educational purposes, notably to support individualized student learning and a model of personalized instruction. Therefore, it is essential to understand the factors that determine adoption in different educational settings. The research results reveal the perceived advantages and disadvantages of smart personal assistants by 161 Croatian primary school teachers (grades 5–8), almost all of whom have not yet used smart personal assistants in class. In this regard, teachers (57.2%) think that smart personal assistants help improve the communication skills of foreign language students in the subject area 67.7% of them believe that the design of smart personal assistants in the Croatian language would encourage its use in classes. The results of our study are expected to have theoretical and practical implications for developing a strategy for introducing this innovative technology into the teaching process, further research in this area, and the design of smart personal assistants.