Privacy Concerns for Use of Voice Activated Personal Assistant in the Public Space.

A review of popular technology adoption models identified several factors that are likely to influence Voice Activated Personal Assistant (VAPA) use in public spaces. To inform design decisions of how to make the private use of the VAPA in public spaces more acceptable from the users’ point of view, an online survey was conducted to investigate the likelihood of usage of the smartphone VAPA such as Apple’s Siri (compared to the usage of smartphone keyboard) as a function of location (private vs. public) and type of information (private vs. nonprivate). Responses from participants showed that users were more cautious of transmitting private than nonprivate information. This effect of type of information was amplified in the social context of public locations and when using conspicuous methods of information input such as the VAPA. Participants also preferred using the VAPA in private locations and showed no preference of location for keyboard entries. Correlations between likelihood of usage of VAPA and the social acceptability ratings were positive and predicted similar patterns of smartphone usage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]