AI anchors from a uses and gratifications perspective: An exploratory study of past, present, and future trends

Artificial intelligence (AI) anchors are increasingly deployed in journalism, entertainment, and education, reshaping how audiences consume media content. Early systems such as Ananova demonstrated the feasibility of virtual presenters but lacked natural prosody and expressiveness. Recent innovations, exemplified by Xinhua’s AI anchor and Microsoft Xiaoice, leverage deep learning-based speech synthesis and multimodal design to achieve greater naturalness, personalization, and interactivity. Drawing on the uses and gratifications (U&G) framework, this study investigates how AI anchors meet cognitive, affective, and trust-related needs in the Chinese context. This study combines acoustic analyses of pitch, formants and intensity with 29 semi-structured interviews, providing complementary insights at both the technical and interpretive levels. Results show that technological refinements enhance clarity and efficiency, but trust is the key mediator that enables functional gratifications to translate into emotional engagement. Participants valued efficiency and multilingual accessibility while expressing concerns about authenticity, credibility, and ethics. This research contributes theoretically by extending U&G to AI-mediated communication and empirically by combining technical and qualitative evidence to analyze user perceptions. Practically, the findings highlight opportunities for deploying AI anchors in routine news, education, and commercial contexts, while underscoring the continued role of human anchors in politically sensitive or emotionally rich communication. These insights add to recent debates on automated journalism and AI-mediated interaction (Jang et al., 2022; Wölker & Powell, 2021). Future research could expand these findings by conducting cross-cultural comparisons, testing the mediating role of trust in experimental settings, and exploring how emerging acoustic and multimodal technologies further shape audience acceptance.