Factors influencing children's relationship with voice assistants

With technological advancements, voice assistants (VA) are becoming more prevalent in children's social environments; however, our understanding of children's relationships with VAs is limited. In this study, the characteristics of elementary school children's (N = 68) parasocial relationships (PSR) with VAs was investigated. To explore the role of interaction characteristics in-depth, an interaction session between children and a VA is included in the current study. Further, the characteristics of children's PSR with the VA were compared to their relationship with close friends, favorite cartoon characters, and toys. The strength of the PSR children formed with the VA they interacted with for the first time was comparable to the PSR they formed with their favorite cartoon characters and toys. The role of VA's artificially intelligent features was discussed in relation to this finding. Agency and life attributions to the VA, as well as children's anthropomorphism tendencies, significantly predicted the strength of children's PSR with the VA. The positive trend observed between children's anthropomorphic language toward the VA and the strength of their PSR indicated that language could be conceptualized as a behavioral indicator of the VA's anthropomorphic conceptualization. Other interaction characteristics did not correlate with the strength of children's PSR with the VA. The current study uses child reports to show that children form PSR with VAs, that the agent characteristics influence children's evaluations in forming PSR, and that using a combination of verbal and behavioral measures is important for obtaining rich findings.