Alexa, What's Inside of You? A Qualitative Study to Explore Users' Mental Models of Intelligent Voice Assistants

Despite the rising prevalence of intelligent voice assistants in people's homes, it remains opaque to most users how they function. With the overall goal to foster informed usage and responsible handling of personal data, the user's understanding increasingly moves into the focus of research. Particularly in the context of black box technologies such as voice assistants, individuals build intuitive mental models (also called folk theories) which can act as a guide for how they understand and interact with such systems. To shed light on individuals' mental models regarding intelligent voice assistants, we applied a visual elicitation method during a citizen science workshop: 26 participants were asked to visualize how they imagine a voice assistant to function. The resulting drawings were categorized based on their theorization complexity level. While basic awareness of the overall functionality (user input - something happens - voice assistant output) was found in every drawing, 13 participants revealed mental models on how the input is received (e.g., audio recording and speech processing), six on how the information is then processed (e.g., database requests and data categorization), and five on how the output is generated (e.g., speech synthesis). Overall, the results underline the need to address individuals' gaps in understanding of intelligent technology that is already in widespread use.