Perceived Intelligence and Perceived Anthropomorphism of Personal Intelligent Agents: Scale Development and Validation

Personal intelligent agents are systems that are autonomous, aware of their environment, continuously learning and adapting to change, able to interact using natural language and capable of completing tasks within a favorable timeframe in a proactive manner. Examples include Siri and Alexa. Several unique characteristics distinguish these agents from other traditional information systems. Of particular interest in this work are characteristics of intelligence and anthropomorphism. This paper describes the process of developing two new measures with satisfactory psychometric properties that can be adapted by researchers to assess the users' perceptions of intelligence and anthropomorphism of PIAs. The measures are validated using data collected from 232 experienced PIA users.