Is My Siri the Same as Your Siri? An Exploration of Users’ Mental Model of Virtual Personal Assistants, Implications for Trust

Abstract

Virtual personal assistants (VPAs) are becoming so widely available that considerations are being made as to whether to begin including them in self-driving vehicles. While research has been done exploring human interactions with single VPAs, there has been a little work exploring human interactions and human mental models with interconnected systems. As companies like Amazon consider whether to integrate Alexa in their self-driving car, research needs to be done to explore whether individual's mental model of these systems is of a single system or if every embodiment of the VPA (e.g., echo) represents a different VPA. Knowing this will allow researchers and practitioners to apply existing models of trust, and predict whether high trust in the Siri that exists in an iPhone will carry over into high (and potentially miscalibrated) trust in Apple's Siri-directed self-driving vehicle. Results indicate that there is not one consistent mental model that users have, and provides the framework for greater exploration into individual differences and the determinants that affect users’ mental model.