Date

6-16-2025

Department

School of Communication and the Arts

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Strategic Media (PhD)

Chair

Robert Mott

Keywords

voice assistants, anthropomorphism, SIRI, artificial intelligence, the media equation theory, social actors, CASA, digital communication

Disciplines

Communication

Abstract

The problem was that there were limited studies that acknowledged how voice-based assistant users perceive the intelligence of voice-based assistants and the different variation levels of trust towards it. The purpose of this quantitative research was to investigate how demographic variables such as generation, ethnicity, gender and education level influence perceptions of trust and perceive intelligence towards AI-voice based assistants. The rationale for this research was that voice-based assistants have garnered 46% of the human-technology interaction. It is pivotal that voice-assistant applications listen to the need of its users’ as it pertains to the user experience. Voice-based assistants users’ perception acts as a microscope that speaks volume to voice assistants’ ability and how it gets culturally utilized. Recent studies have shown that voice-based assistant user’ perception of intelligences dictates users’ attitude towards the technology; also, their perception of anthropomorphism shifts. The central research question for this study was: Do human beings trust voice-based assistants more than themselves? The quantitative design used a survey that consisted of various closed-ended questions such as the 7-point Likert scale. Amazon M-Turk was utilized to expose a simple random sampling technique, and a total of 1171 qualified participants completed the survey. Data were analyzed through a series of descriptive statistics, ANOVA, an independent t-test and linear regressions to analyze the other mentioned research questions.

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