Understanding older adults' continued-use intention of AI voice assistants

With the aging of the population, technology has emerged as a promising avenue to tackle the challenges faced by older adults. Artificially Intelligent (AI) voice assistants (VAs) have been widely recognized as a potential solution to meet the needs of the elderly population, as demonstrated in various related projects. The hands-free interface and increasingly personalized capabilities of technology can offer a wide range of benefits for older adults. To ensure the long-term and stable value of AI VAs in older adults, it is necessary to evaluate their continued-use intention. Based on the S-O-R framework, technology acceptance model and attachment theory, we construct a model to explore the relationship between different personalized features of AI VAs, emotional attachment, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and continued-use intention among older adults, and to analyse whether technology anxiety plays a moderating role between emotional attachment and continued-use intention. The results confirm that the personalized response and recommendation of AI VAs have a significant impact on perceived ease of use, while personalized voice interfaces do not. In addition, emotional attachment not only improves older users' perceptions of the ease of use and usefulness, but also positively influences continued-use intention together with both of them. The presence of technology anxiety, on the other hand, did not have an impact on the relationship between emotional attachment and continued-use intention.