Usability Study of Voice-Activated Smart Home Technology

One of the most recent and popular forms of technology in the consumer market is the virtual voice assistant (i.e., smart speaker) made by well-known companies such as Amazon Echo and Google Home. These devices allow users to perform voice interaction to perform a variety of tasks that can be beneficial to consumer groups such as high school students, college students, rural consumers, families, senior citizens, and disabled consumers. Thus, this study investigated the key elements of different consumer groups related to voice-activated smart home technology in order to understand how to educate and promote this technology to individual groups. In the study, there were 71 participants from six consumer groups including high school students, college students, rural consumers, consumers with disabilities, seniors, and families. Each group was surveyed prior and after a demonstrative smart home workshop to evaluate their knowledge, perceived usefulness, and preferential use of smart home technology. The results of the study showed that while the utilization of voice-activated smart home technology was not significantly different between consumer groups, the top-three benefits of using this technology were security, safety, and assurance. The major barriers that prevented consumer groups from implementing the technology was the cost of the system and concerns with user privacy.