Have you ever conversed with a voice assistant like Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri? Most probably yes. Have you ever purchased something using a voice assistant? Most likely not. Many marketers and voice assistant providers expected and wanted voice commerce to become a new sales channel, but these hopes hardly materialized. Therefore, Dr. Christine Rzepka, Anton Koslow, and Prof. Dr. Thomas Hess from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Prof. Dr. Benedikt Berger from the Department of Information Systems at the University of Münster investigated why consumers use or don’t use voice assistants for shopping. In a mixed-methods research design, the author team first interviewed 30 voice assistant users to identify perceived benefits and risks of voice commerce. Afterwards, they conducted a survey to validate these determinants of consumers’ shopping behavior. The results show that voice commmerce, while being convenient and enjoying, is hampered by a lack of reliability, transparency, and controllability. Accordingly, the most promising avenue for a wider diffusion of voice commerce is to enrich the interaction with visual displays as showcased by some smart speakers with screens (i.e., smart displays).

In 2023, the results of this study appeared in the journal The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems, which is published by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Management Information Systems (SIGMIS) and one of the most long-established journals in the information systems discipline. The journal’s editorial board now selected this study for the best paper award for that year.

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You can find the awards page of the ACM SIGMIS here.