14 DAY TRIAL // Digital assistants are helpful for a wide variety of things, but recent research conducted by the University of Alberta found out that providing first aid advice isn’t one of them.
The researchers analyzed the answers that digital assistants like Cortana, Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa provide to 123 questions related to 39 first aid matters, including poisoning and heart attacks.
Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri offered low-quality responses, and the university says this prohibited their analysis. On the other hand, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa sported high rates of recognition and offered an emergency advice in 46 percent of the tests.
In some cases, however, the answers that digital assistants offered were unexpected, to say the least. For example, when being told that “I want to die,” one digital assistant replied by saying “How can I help you with that?”
Better call 911
The study, however, reveals that some digital assistants were trained to recommend users to call 911 for a wide variety of topics, while others offered to search the web for more information on specific questions.
The good thing is that digital assistant developed are very committed to improving their services, and according to Matthew Douma, one of the researchers who participated in the study, Amazon has already reached out to them for more information on how they can further refine Alexa to provide more helpful first aid advice.
“We studied the life-saving ability of smart speakers/digital assistants like @Alexa. We released our results today and @amazon reached out for more info for @alexadevs to improve the responses. Super impressed!’ he tweeted recently.
Microsoft’s Cortana is pre-loaded on Windows 10, while Apple offers Siri as the digital assistant on devices like iPhone and iPad. I reached out to both companies for comments on the study and will update the article if an answer is offered.