Evaluation of COVID-19 Information Provided by Digital Voice Assistants

Background: Digital voice assistants are widely used for health information seeking activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the rapidly changing nature of COVID-19 information, there is a need to evaluate COVID-related information provided by voice assistants, to ensure consumers’ needs are met and prevent misinformation. The objective of this study is to evaluate COVID-related information provided by the voice assistants in terms of relevance, accuracy, comprehensiveness, user-friendliness and reliability. Materials and Methods: The voice assistants evaluated were Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Google Assistant, Samsung Bixby, Apple Siri and Microsoft Cortana. Two evaluators posed COVID-19 questions to the voice assistants and evaluated responses based on relevance, accuracy, comprehensiveness, user-friendliness and reliability. Questions were obtained from the World Health Organization, governmental websites, forums and search trends. Data was analyzed using Pearson’s correlation, independent samples t-tests and Wilcoxon rank-sum tests. Results: Google Assistant and Siri performed the best across all evaluation parameters with mean scores of 84.0% and 80.6% respectively. Bixby performed the worst among the smartphone-based voice assistants (65.8%). On the other hand, Google Home performed the best among the non-smartphone voice assistants (60.7%), followed by Alexa (43.1%) and Cortana (13.3%). Smartphone-based voice assistants had higher mean scores than voice assistants on other platforms (76.8% versus 39.1%, p = 0.064). Google Assistant consistently scored better than Google Home for all the evaluation parameters. A decreasing score trend from Google Assistant, Siri, Bixby, Google Home, Alexa and Cortana was observed for majority of the evaluation criteria, except for accuracy, comprehensiveness and credibility. Conclusion: Google Assistant and Apple Siri were able to provide users with relevant, accurate, comprehensive, user-friendly, and reliable information regarding COVID-19. With the rapidly evolving information on this pandemic, users need to be discerning when obtaining COVID-19 information from voice assistants.