Voice Assistant, Buy Coffee Capsules! Understanding the Determinants of Consumers’ Intention to Use Voice Commerce

Rzepka Christine, Berger Benedikt, Koslow Anton, Hess Thomas

Abstract

Owing to increasing adoption rates of voice assistants (VAs), integrating voice commerce (VC) as a new consumer channel is among the top objectives of businesses’ current voice initiatives. VC offers consumers a new way of shopping by using VAs, which comes with benefits but also entails risks that extant literature only partially examines. Therefore, this research seeks to understand consumers’ perceived benefits and risks when using VC by means of a mixed-methods design. In the first study, we conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with VA users to develop a research model of VC risks and benefits. The second study empirically validated the research model using survey data from 176 participants. According to our results, consumers perceive VC as convenient and enjoyable but also perceive risks regarding the VA’s reliability, opacity, and controllability. Thus, we shed light on the determinants of channel choice in e-commerce and provide guidelines for designing VC applications.