Context-Dependent Use of Authority and Empathy in Lifestyle Advices Given By Persuasive Voice Assistants

As smart technology becomes more readily available for the general public, so do the systems that can benefit of such technology, such as recommender systems and Voice Assistants. Persuasive Voice Assistants have a great potential to change people's lives by promoting changes in behavior that benefit people's health and lifestyles. Previous studies have focused on finding personality traits that systems can use to optimize persuasive capabilities, but the findings have been contradictory. In this study, we investigate these contradictions by comparing the effect of empathic phrasing versus authoritative phrasing of persuasive recommendations in three lifestyle-related domains. The study results as well as the literature survey strongly indicate that it is close to impossible to isolate general effects, emphasizing the importance of taking all specifics of the user population, individual differences and user context as whole - as well as interactions between these variables - into account when designing persuasive adaptive systems.