Designing an age-friendly conversational AI agent for mobile banking: the effects of voice modality and lip movement

Age factor is a significant barrier in adopting mobile banking mainly due to low competence in using the system and security concerns. Thus, this study presents a conversational artificial intelligence agent-based mobile banking app that is specially designed for seniors considering their needs and physical characteristics. Voice modality and lip-movement were identified as the important factors to improve seniors’ mobile banking service experience and the effect of them were empirically tested by conducting a controlled experiment with between-subject design. In total, 91 participants who were 55 years or older used the app to complete the given tasks of online banking. Results showed that those in the two voice modality conditions, compared to text agent condition, reported higher levels of trust, perceived ease of use, and social presence. The effect of lip movement of the agent also showed significant results in those three dependant variables. The result of mediation analysis revealed that agent's lip movement increased social presence and perceived ease of use, which further increased trust toward the agent. The results are meaningful especially because trust and perceived ease of use were listed as the main reason for not using online banking services among non-users. The implications of the study were discussed.