Talking to machines

Cover of Talking to machines, Frontier Report No. 12

Frontier Report No. 12 · 21 pages · 22 sources

How do people respond to voice assistants and AI agents?

People treat talking machines as social beings: hearing words spoken makes a writer seem more human, and a name and voice raise trust. But telling customers they are talking to a chatbot cut purchases by about 80 per cent in one field experiment, and AI shopping agents in a simulated market favoured the first offer they received.

What the report found

  1. A voice makes a machine seem to have a mind. In four experiments, people who heard words spoken were more likely to believe a human had written them than people who read the same words.
  2. Human touches raise trust. Drivers in a simulator trusted a driverless car more when it had a name and a voice, and blamed it less after an accident it did not cause.
  3. Knowing it is a machine changes the sale. In a field experiment with 6,000 customers, chatbots sold as well as skilled staff when undisclosed, but purchases fell by about 80 per cent when customers were told first.
  4. Agents have their own biases. In a simulated market built by Microsoft researchers, AI shopping agents picked the first offer they received far more often than later, better ones.
  5. The UAE is ready to delegate, on conditions. In one survey, 77 per cent of UAE consumers were familiar with AI agents, and across the region shoppers wanted to approve purchases, set limits and see why the agent chose what it did.

What is inside

  1. What is new
  2. What older research tells us
  3. What early studies suggest
  4. What nobody knows yet
  5. Questions worth watching

Plus an evidence maturity map, a scenario grid and a list of signals to watch.

Who it is for

For marketers, retailers, product teams, designers of assistants and anyone whose customers will soon send an agent to shop for them.

How we work

Frontier Reports separate what is established from what is emerging and what remains untested. Every claim is graded, and where researchers disagree, as they do on whether assistants should sound human, both sides are set out before we say where we stand.

Cite this report

The Why We Project (2026) Talking to machines: Voice assistants and agents at home. Frontier Report No. 12. Dubai: Why We Tech Ltd. Available at: thewhyweproject.com