• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.119-125
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• 2023

Smart home in the 4th industrial revolution environment is where all devices in the home are connected to each other to provide the optimal living environment desired by the user. Artificial intelligence speakers are being used as a way to manage and control all devices used in this environment. The function of an artificial intelligence speaker ranges from simple music playback to serving as an interface that controls and manages all devices in a smart home space. In this study, we investigated and analyzed the usability of artificial intelligence speakers based on the current status of domestic and overseas markets and the survey contents of two organizations (Korea Consumer Agency and Korea Information and Communication Policy Institute (KISDI)). In addition, we investigated and analyzed the usability of artificial intelligence speakers. Based on the results of responses from users from two related organizations, major problems were derived, and major improvement measures, such as discovering new functions and improving voice recognition performance, were also described.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.25-42
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• 2019

AI speakers which are wireless speakers with smart features have released from many manufacturers and adopted by many customers. Though smart features including voice recognition, controlling connected devices and providing information are embedded in many mobile phones, AI speakers are sitting in home and has a role of the central en-tertainment and information provider. Many surveys have investigated the important factors to adopt AI speakers and influ-encing factors on satisfaction. Though most surveys on AI speakers are cross sectional, we can track customer attitude toward AI speakers longitudinally by analyzing customer reviews on AI speakers. However, there is not much research on the change of customer attitude toward AI speaker. Therefore, in this study, we try to grasp how the attitude of AI speaker changes with time by applying text mining-based analysis. We collected the customer reviews on Amazon Echo which has the highest share of AI speakers in the global market from Amazon.com. Since Amazon Echo already have two generations, we can analyze the characteristics of reviews and compare the attitude ac-cording to the adoption time. We identified all sub topics of customer reviews and specified the topics for smart features. And we analyzed how the share of topics varied with time and analyzed diverse meta data for comparisons. The proportions of the topics for general satisfaction and satisfaction on music were increasing while the proportions of the topics for music quality, speakers and wireless speakers were decreasing over time. Though the proportions of topics for smart fea-tures were similar according to time, the share of the topics in positive reviews and importance metrics were reduced in the 2nd generation of Amazon Echo. Even though smart features were mentioned similarly in the reviews, the influential effect on satisfac-tion were reduced over time and especially in the 2nd generation of Amazon Echo.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.999-1015
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• 2023

Smart speakers represent a growing product in home electronics. However, their capability to record voices in their immediate surroundings has spurred concerns about privacy violations. In this paper, we assess the extent of those concerns in the opinions of smart speaker users by examining the reviews posted by smart speaker users. We focus on South Korea as a representative of advanced Asian economies. The results show that Korean smart speaker users are either unconcerned or unaware of privacy issues, confirming the results of previous studies about UK users, but with an even lower degree of interest in the topic. However, for the few users concerned about privacy, their attitude towards privacy influences their overall opinion about smart speakers.

• Journal of the HCI Society of Korea
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.15-22
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to investigate the users' expectation and expectation gap about the attributes of smart speaker as an intelligent agent, ie autonomy, sociality, responsiveness, activeness, time continuity, goal orientation. To this end, semi-structured interviews were conducted for smart speaker users and analyzed based on ground theory. Result has shown that people have huge expectation gap about the sociality and human-likeness of smart speakers, due to limitations in technology. The responsiveness of smart speakers was found to have positive expectation gap. For the memory of time-sequential information, there was an ambivalent expectation gap depending on the degree of information sensitivity and presentation method. We also found that there was a low expectation level for autonomous aspects of smart speakers. In addition, proactive aspects were preferred only when appropriate for the context. This study presents implications for designing a way to interact with smart speakers and managing expectations.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.191-205
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• 2018

With the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, many consumer products have adopted AI features for providing proactive and personalized services to customers. One of the most prominent products featuring AI techniques is a smart speaker. The fundamental of smart speaker is a portable wireless Internet connecting speaker which already have existed in a consumer market. By applying AI techniques, smart speakers can recognize human voices and communicate with them. In addition, they can control other connecting devices and provide offline services. The goal of this study is to identify the impact of AI techniques for customer rating to the products. We compared customer reviews of other portable speakers without AI features and those of a smart speaker. Amazon echo is used for a smart speaker and JBL Flip 4 Bluetooth Speaker and Ultimate Ears BOOM 2 Panther Limited Edition are used for the comparison. These products are in the same price range ($50~100) and selected as featured products in Amazon.com. All reviews for the products were collected and common words for all products and unique words of the smart speaker were identified. Information gain values were calculated to identify the influences of words to be rated as positive or negative. Positive and negative words in all the products or in Amazon echo were identified, too. Topic modeling was applied to the customer reviews on Amazon echo and the importance of each topic were measured by summating information gain values of each topic. This study provides a way of identifying customer responses on the AI feature and measuring the importance of the feature among diverse features of the products.

• Journal of Internet of Things and Convergence
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.41-46
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• 2022

Smart home in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment aims to provide an optimal living environment for users by connecting all devices in the home. In such a smart home environment, artificial intelligence speakers are being used as a way to manage and control all devices. The existing speaker function is changing from simple music playback to the role of an interface that controls and manages all devices in the smart home space. This study dealt with the market status and usability analysis in the US and Korea, the leader in artificial intelligence speakers. The main target companies were Amazon, Google, and Apple in the US, as well as Kakao, SKT, and KT in Korea. In addition, based on the reaction results of domestic users to artificial intelligence speakers, the derivation of major problems and directions for improvement were described.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.197-210
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• 2020

The smart speaker includes an AI assistant function in the existing portable speaker, which enables a person to give various commands using a voice and provides various offline services associated with control of a connected device. The speed of domestic distribution is also increasing, and the functions and linked services available through smart speakers are expanding to shopping and food orders. Through text mining-based customer review analysis, there have been many proposals for identifying the impact on customer attitudes, sentiment analysis, and product evaluation of product functions and attributes. Emotional investigation has been performed by extracting words corresponding to characteristics or features from product reviews and analyzing the impact on assessment. After obtaining the topic from the review, the effect on the evaluation was analyzed. And the market competition of similar products was visualized. Also, a study was conducted to analyze the reviews of smart speaker users through text mining and to identify the main attributes, emotional sensitivity analysis, and the effects of artificial intelligence attributes on product satisfaction. The purpose of this study is to collect blog posts about the user's experiences of smart speakers released in Korea and to analyze the attitudes of customers according to their attributes. Through this, customers' attitudes can be identified and visualized by each smart speaker product, and the positioning map of the product was derived based on customer recognition of smart speaker products by collecting the information identified by each property.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.1-9
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• 2022

Recently, the functions of smart speakers have diversified, and the penetration rate of smart speakers is increasing. As it becomes more widespread, various techniques have been proposed to cause anomalous behavior against smart speakers. Dolphin Attack, which causes anomalous behavior against the Voice Controllable System (VCS) during various attacks, is a representative method. With this method, a third party controls VCS using ultrasonic band (f>20kHz) without the user's recognition. However, since the method uses the ultrasonic band, it is necessary to install an ultrasonic speaker or an ultrasonic dedicated device which is capable of outputting an ultrasonic signal. In this paper, a smart speaker is controlled by generating an audio signal modulated at a frequency (18 to 20) which is difficult for a person to hear although it is in the human audible frequency band without installing an additional device, that is, an ultrasonic device. As a result with the method proposed in this paper, while humans could not recognize voice commands even in the audible band, it was possible to control the smart speaker with a probability of 82 to 96%.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.10 no.11
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• pp.33-39
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• 2019

Edutech, which combines education and information technology, is in the spotlight. Core technologies of the 4th Industrial Revolution have been actively used in education. Students use an AI-based learning platform to self-diagnose their needs. And get personalized training online with a cloud learning platform. Recently, a new educational medium called smart speaker that combines artificial intelligence technology and voice recognition technology has emerged and provides various educational services. The purpose of this study is to suggest a way to use smart speaker educationally to overcome the limitation of existing education. To this end, the concept and characteristics of smart speakers were analyzed, and the implications were derived by analyzing the contents provided by smart speakers. Also, the problem of using smart speaker was considered.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.149-166
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• 2023

Purpose - This study aimed to examine the influence of various factors on customer satisfaction and the continuance usage intention, based on the purchasing type of smart speaker users. Design/methodology/approach - Data was gathered through surveys, collecting responses from 180 smart speaker users in Korea. Structural equation modeling was utilized to analyze the data. Findings - Both perceived usefulness and perceived security were observed to have a significant positive impact on customer satisfaction across all user groups. Moreover, perceived ease of use and perceived versatility showed a significant positive effect on the continuance usage intention. Notably, for those who acquired the smart speakers for free, perceived usefulness had a positive impact on the continuance usage intention. Conversely, for those who made a paid purchase, perceived versatility played a significant role in driving customer satisfaction. Research implications or Originality - This research offers insights into the Korean smart speaker market, a unique environment where local competitors thrive in the absence of giants like Amazon and Google. It provides a nuanced view of customer reactions to these innovative devices. The study further distinguishes between high-involvement (paid purchase users) and low-involvement (free acquisition users) consumers, offering a more detailed understanding of user perspectives based on their acquisition mode.