Project description

AI-based voice assistants have spread rapidly and are playing an increasingly important role in the everyday lives of users. Owners can access a wide range of applications via voice. The assistants are also used for information search and thus provide an alternative to conventional screen-based search engines. The project is dedicated to the question of how voice assistants affect the search for and the evaluation of information.

It is important to know which information services are offered by voice assistants, which ones are most frequently used and how the information presented is selected. Compared to the text-based search, where users receive a list of multiple search results that can be compared and evaluated, voice assistants that are integrated into speakers without a screen usually provide only a single spoken answer selected by the device.

By means of questionnaire studies and experiments, the project investigated how people use these technologies in their everyday lives and how the trustworthiness of the information source is perceived when the information is presented in spoken rather than written form.