The Duality of Autonomy on Continuous Usage of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs): From Agency Perspective

Based on the contradictory phenomenon of rapid development of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) embedded in smart IoT devices, this study examines the dual role of IPAs Autonomy (in terms of decision-making autonomy, scheduling autonomy and methods autonomy) in influencing users’ IPAs usage through users’ experience of agency. Drawing on agency theories, we identify two different types of experience of agency — perceived competence and perceived uncertainty. We hypothesize that these two contradictory aspects of experiences of agency would well explain the complex relationship between IPAs autonomy and IPAs usage. Scale development and data collection would be conducted for the future work. It is expected that the findings of this study could contribute to theoretical and practical implications for the design of IPAs