How should voice assistants be heard? The mitigating effect of verbal and vocal warmth in voice assistant service failure
Abstract
Voice assistants have become increasingly popular touchpoints in AI-infused service encounters in the hospitality industry. Although we have seen a growing body of research in this area, little attention has been paid to specific service failures involving exclusively voice interactions. Drawing from the Computers As Social Actors (CASA) research paradigm and the Stereotype Content Model, this research explores how warmth can mitigate the negative consequences of service failure involving voice assistants. In two experiments using both physiological (EDA) and psychological measures, we show that the perception of warmth improves consumers’ emotional reactions and increases re-patronage intention following a negative service outcome. We also found that the optimal voice to be used for a voice assistant is a dynamic speech style combined with emotionally expressive and warm verbal content. These findings contribute to the knowledge of voice-based smart service interaction and provide insight into how to mitigate the negative consequences of service failure involving voice assistants.
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Studies within the customer service domain utilised telephones [9, 11, 15, 27, 32, 66] or computer speakers [29, 38].
“By contrast, studies within the customer service domain utilised telephones [9, 11, 15, 27, 32, 66] or computer speakers [29, 38].”
From System and User Strategies to Repair Conversational Breakdowns of Spoken Dialogue Systems: A Scoping Review (2024) · cites this paper as [29]
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“Third, while prior research on HRI suggests that various factors such as appearance (Bergmann et al., 2012; Kim et al., 2019), expression (i.e. smile) (Yu & Boyol Ngan, 2019), and gesture (Biancardi et al., 2017; Salem et al., 2013) a ff ect judgment of warmth for non-human entities, the e ff ect of…”
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Alghamdi, E., Halvey, M., & Nicol, E. (2024) · ACM Conversational User Interfaces 2024 · doi:10.1145/3640794.3665558 · Cited by 36 · see citing works
- Authors
- Huang, B., & Sénécal, S.
- Affiliations
- University of Nottingham Ningbo China (CN)
- HEC Montréal (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Huang, Bo
- Venue
- The Service Industries Journal
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2023-05-12
- Volume
- 43
- Issue
- 11-12
- Pages
- 806-826
- ISSN
- 0264-2069 (ISSN-L)
- 1743-9507
- OpenAlex
- W4376505462
- Cited by
- 27
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 9 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 1
- FWCI
- 2.55
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Service Industries Journal (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › AI in Service Interactions
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Customer Service Quality and Loyalty
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Emotional Labor in Professions
- Keywords
- voice assistants, service failure, warmth, computers as social actors, stereotype content model, emotional responses, hospitality industry, speech style, emotional expressiveness
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