A Survey Investigating Usage of Virtual Personal Assistants

Abstract: Despite significant improvements in automatic speech recognition and spoken language understanding - human interaction with Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) through speech remains irregular and sporadic. According to recent studies, currently the usage of VPAs is constrained to basic tasks such as checking facts, playing music, and obtaining weather updates.In this paper, we present results of a survey (N = 118) that analyses usage of VPAs by frequent and infrequent users. We investigate how usage experience, performance expectations, and privacy concerns differ between these two groups. The results indicate that, compared with infrequent users, frequent users of VPAs are more satisfied with their assistants, more eager to use them in a variety of settings, yet equally concerned about their privacy.