RECEPTIVITY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AMONG CONSUMERS

Abstract

Interaction with a virtual personal assistant on a smartphone or any other smart device, or interaction with a smart bot (chatbot) on a website rather than a human customer representative is reality these days. Personal assistants, which goes by multiple names viz. virtual personal assistants (VPAs), intelligent personal assistants, digital personal assistants, virtual agents, mobile assistants, or voice assistants, have become prevailing technology. Examples include Siri, Google Assistant, Bixby, etc. Indeed, a search for “personal assistants” on Google Play at the end of 2017 gave more than 100 results. Many of these VPAs can be used to perform a variety of tasks on smartphones, such as searching or finding something on the internet using voice command, finding movie timings, real time navigations, doing basic calculations and conversions, checking the mail, and engaging in a conversation with the assistant itself. Others provide a much more specific purpose, such as monitoring the fitness level, getting recipes, etc. The software and smartphone giants have been pushing their assistant in most of their products and expect it to be the major game changing technology of the future. The term conversational interface is used to define the technology behind the interactive interface which allows conversation with the voice assistants through voice input and other modalities. To explain it even further we have displayed some examples of the interactions that can be performed with a VPA via conversational interface.