Love is in the air! – What creates strong bonds between voice assistants and their users

Over the past decade, voice assistants have been making their way into people’s lives. Anecdotal evidence suggests that users can form strong – and even loving - relationships with their voice assistants (VAs). However, research on antecedents of close and long-lasting relationships is scarce. With our study, we link different VA attributes and benefits to cognitive, emotional and behavioral user responses, i.e. satisfaction, love and future usage intention. We find that the creation of a stable, affective relationship is mainly related to emotional benefits, which can be established by a superior response quality.