User Experience with Smart Voice Assistants: The Accent Perspective

Voice assistants (VA) like Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Bixby are increasingly becoming popular among the general mass. They are being used by a large group of people who use English as their primary mode of communication (native speakers) as well as those who are secondary English language speakers (non-native speakers). However, from an end-user perspective very little is known about the usability, acceptability, satisfaction, and the usage pattern of the VA's between these two different group of users. The current study aims to identify if there exist any differences between these two group of users with respect to the overall usability and the satisfaction received after using the VA's. To answer the research questions a mixed methodology approach is undertaken comprising of an online questionnaire survey in conjunction with a real-world testing of the VA's. The experiment is conducted in Thailand with 275 users for the questionnaire phase and 52 users for the testing phase from 7 different countries. Siri and Alexa are used as the VA representatives since they are the two most popular ones in Thailand. Results suggest no significant differences in usability between the two user groups, however the same being significant for the satisfaction levels.