Older Adults’ Interaction With Intelligent Virtual Assistants: The Role of Information Modality and Feedback

Abstract

Intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) can help older adults with information queries. Examining older adults’ preferences for IVAs’ information presentation can help improve user experience and older adults’ acceptance of IVAs. This study investigated the effects of information modality and feedback on older adults’ social presence, attitudinal outcomes (i.e., perceived enjoyment and satisfaction), and acceptance (i.e., perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and behavioral intention to use). A total of 102 subjects were recruited to participate in two experiments. Results show that the visual-auditory bimodality is superior to single visual modality and single auditory modality for older adults based on the perceptions of social presence, attitudinal outcomes, and acceptance. Older adults perceived greater social presence, perceived enjoyment, satisfaction, and acceptance with text feedback than without in IVAs. Social-oriented voice feedback can improve older adults’ perceptions of social presence, enjoyment, satisfaction, and acceptance than task-oriented voice feedback. This study provides practical implications in the design of IVAs’ information presentation targeted at older adults.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 46 citations exist upstream.