With the growing utility of today’s conversational virtual assistants, the importance of user motivation in human–artificial intelligence interactions is becoming more obvious. However, previous studies in this and related fields, such as human–computer interaction, scarcely discussed intrinsic motivation (the motivation to interact with the assistants for fun). Previous studies either treated motivation as an inseparable concept or focused on non-intrinsic motivation (the motivation to interact with the assistant for utilitarian purposes). The current study aims to cover intrinsic motivation by taking an affective engineering approach. A novel motivation model is proposed, in which intrinsic motivation is affected by two factors that derive from user interactions with virtual assistants: expectation of capability and uncertainty. Experiments in which these two factors are manipulated by making participants believe they are interacting with the smart speaker “Amazon Echo” are conducted. Intrinsic motivation is measured both by using questionnaires and by covertly monitoring a five-minute free-choice period in the experimenter’s absence, during which the participants could decide for themselves whether to interact with the virtual assistants. Results of the first experiment showed that high expectation engenders more intrinsically motivated interaction compared with low expectation. However, the results did not support our hypothesis that expectation and uncertainty have an interaction effect on intrinsic motivation. We then revised our hypothetical model of action selection accordingly and conducted a verification experiment of the effects of uncertainty. Results of the verification experiment showed that reducing uncertainty encourages more interactions and causes the motivation behind these interactions to shift from non-intrinsic to intrinsic.
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