BBC News has an interesting article about AI, entitled “The AI companions you can have conversations with”.
These “AI companions” are a form of conversational AI which, like Alexa, can interact with users through voice recognition and natural language processing. However, unlike Alexa, they can also recognise emotion and use empathy to craft their interactions.
As explained by one of the interviewees quoted in the article, Mati Staniszewski, the boss of Eleven Labs, in addition to understanding the content of the message, these AI-based “tools can take into account the spirit of a sentence, and how the words connect to each other… (they can) capture the intonation, tone and emotion the AI speaker intends to convey” and, then, reply accordingly. Because these AI companions “can convey happiness, excitability or boredom“, as described by another interviewee, Professor Trevor Cox, they can tailor their replies to the user, which will make communication more effective.
This BBC News article reminded me of a paper that I read recently which argued that, as consumers become more aware of AI tools, and familiar with their use, it is no longer enough for the tools to be right – they also need to deliver on emotional value. Among other things, the authors of that paper examined how AI tools could deliver recognition and hedonic value, and they showed that such value was more important than the specific personalised recommendation in increasing customers’ willingness to pay. Recognition value refers to “aspects such as feeling welcome, safe, important, and respected” (page 152); in turn, hedonic value refers to aspects such as entertainment, excitement, or the delivery of memorable experiences.
That study is described in the paper “Me and my AI: Exploring the effects of consumer self‐construal and AI‐based experience on avoiding similarity and willingness to pay”, and it was authored by Sandra Maria Correia Loureiro, Jano Jiménez-Barreto, Ricardo Godinho Bilro and Jaime Romero.
Reading this BBC News article and that paper made me wonder if the reason why the participants in our study of AI personalisation in physical retail were so focused on functional value (namely discounts!) because shopping for clothes was already seen as an hedonic activity in itself (as we propose in that paper), or because of the relative novelty of that AI application. I can’t help wondering: Would they have a different reaction, now, that generative AI has become mainstream?
Ana Canhoto 