Do Sequels Outperform or Disappoint? Insights from an Analysis of Amazon Echo Consumer Reviews

Rapid technological advances in recent years drastically transformed our world. Amidst modern technological inventions such as smart phones, smart watches and smart home devices, consumers of electronic digital devices experience greatly improved automation, productivity, and efficiency in conducting routine daily tasks, information searching, shopping as well as finding entertainment. In the last few years, the global smart speaker market has undergone significant growth. As technology continues to advance and smart speakers are equipped with innovative features, the adoption of smart speakers will increase and so will consumer expectations. This research paper presents an aspect-specific sentiment analysis of consumer reviews of the first three generations of Amazon Echo. Our text mining and aspect-specific sentiment analyses reveal that price, sound, smart home, connectivity, and comparison are outperforming aspects whereas voice, app, Q&A, companionship, and shelf life are disappointing and sunsetting aspects. Our study demonstrates a novel cross-generation visualization of directional changes in consumer sentiment using the Bollinger Bands and volume charts

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/spy2.15#:~:text=A%20review%20and%20an%20empirical%20analysis%20of%20privacy%20policy%20and%20notices%20for%20consumer%20Internet%20of%20things

The privacy policies and practices of six consumer Internet of things (IoT) devices were reviewed and compared. In addition, an empirical verification of the compliance of privacy policies for data collection practices on two voice-activated intelligent assistant devices, namely the Amazon Echo Dot and Google Home devices was performed. The review shows that IoT privacy policies may not be usable from the human-computer interaction perspective because IoT policies are included as part of the manufacturers\u27 general privacy policy (which may include policies unrelated to the device), or the IoT policy requires to read (in addition to the IoT policies) the manufacturers\u27 general privacy policy which increase the cognitive load for the user. It was also found that future policy changes along with the approach to provide user consent to changes may adversely affect the privacy of the consumer because changes to policies may not provide choice to consumers to opt out from data collection practices if consumers are not aware of the changes. Finally, the empirical results for the Amazon Echo Dot and the Google Home devices demonstrate they adhere to their privacy policies when voice is collected through these devices