Voice your Opinion! Young Voters’ Usage and Perceptions of a Text-based, Voice-based and Text-Voice combined Conversational Agent Voting Advice Application (CAVAA)

Conversational Agent Voting Advice Applications (CAVAAs) have been proven to be valuable information retrieval systems for citizens who aim to obtain a voting advice based on their answers to political attitude statements but desire additional on-demand information about the political issues first by using a chatbot functionality.

Research on CAVAAs is relatively young and in previous studies only the effects of textual CAVAAs has been examined. In light of the positive effects of these tools found in earlier studies, we compared different modalities in which information can be requested to further optimize the design of these information retrieval systems. In an experimental study (N = 60), three CAVAA modalities (text, voice, or a combination of text and voice) were compared on tool evaluation measures (ease of use, usefulness, and enjoyment), political measures (perceived and factual political knowledge), and usage measures (the amount of information retrieved from the chatbot and miscommunication).