My Voice as a Daily Reminder: Self-Voice Alarm for Daily Goal Achievement

Abstract

Sticking to daily plans is essential for achieving life goals but challenging in reality. This study presents a self-voice alarm as a novel daily goal reminder. Based on the strong literature on the psychological effects of self-voice, we developed a voice alarm system that reminds users of daily tasks to support their consistent task completion. Over the course of 14 days, participants (N = 63) were asked to complete daily vocabulary tasks when reminded by an alarm (i.e., self-voice vs. other-voice vs. beep sound alarm). The self-voice alarm elicited higher alertness and uncomfortable feelings while fostering more days of task completion and repetition compared to the beep sound alarm. Both self-voice and other-voice alarms increased users' perceived usefulness of the alarm system. Leveraging both quantitative and qualitative approaches, we provide a practical guideline for designing voice alarm systems that will foster users' behavioral changes to achieve daily goals.