Alexa, Can You Help Me Solve That Problem? - Understanding the Value of Smart Personal Assistants as Tutors for Complex Problem Tasks
Rainer Winkler, Eva Alice Christiane Bittner, Matthias Söllner · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2019
In recent decades, the number of students per lecturer at universitieshas constantly risen. In these learning scenarios, individual lecturer support forhelping students actively acquiring new knowledge is hardly possible. However,active student behavior is necessary for successful learning. Smart PersonalAssistants such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Home promise to fill this gap bybeing students’ individual tutors. In order to understand what students expectfrom Smart Personal Assistants as tutors and how they interact with them, wewill carry out an experiment. In this research in progress paper, we present ourexperiment design, where we observe the individual interaction between studentsand a Smart Personal Assistant tutor and between students and a human tutorapplying the same methods in both cases. Drawing on the concepts of parasocialinteraction and trust, we derive hypotheses, present the Smart Personal Assistantdevelopment and explain the experiment process in detail.