When the recipe is more important than the ingredients: Unveiling the complexity of consumer use of voice assistants
研究提出消费者持续使用语音助手并非由单一因素决定，而是由产品属性与消费者特征的特定组合共同作用，为理解不同消费者为何继续或停止使用语音助手提供了整体视角。
Abstract The widespread use of voice assistants (VAs) creates a pressing need to understand what drives consumers to use different VAs. Existing studies have commonly focused on the net effects of antecedents that explain why consumers adopt or continue using VAs, ignoring the complexity of consumer behavior and the combinatorial effects of multiple antecedents. Our study proposes that consumer intention to continue using VAs does not depend on a single characteristic of products or consumers but on specific configurations of such characteristics. By integrating human–technology interaction and media richness theories, we suggest that consumers with distinct psychometric profiles and learning styles may evaluate humanlike and technological attributes of VAs differently. Our study shows that the complex interconnectedness between different VA attributes and consumer characteristics can provide a holistic understanding of why some consumers continue or stop using VAs. The results advance the media richness literature by offering novel insights into multimodality in consumer–technology interactions by examining consumer evaluations of single and multimodal VAs (e.g., smart speakers vs. touchscreen smart speakers). Our study provides templates for managers to effectively design VAs aligned with their segmentation and targeting strategies.