Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Nov 3, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Nov 3, 2021 - Dec 29, 2021
Date Accepted: Dec 29, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jan 18, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Evaluating Voice Assistants Responses in Portuguese for COVID-19 Vaccination
ABSTRACT
Background:
Voice Assistants (VAs) are devices that respond to human voices and can be commanded to do a variety of tasks. Nowadays, VAs are being used to obtain health information, which has become a critical point of analysis for researchers in terms of question understanding and quality of response. Particularly, the COVID-19 pandemic has and still is severely affecting people worldwide, which demands studies on how VAs can be used as a tool to provide useful information.
Objective:
This work aims to perform a quality analysis of different VAs’ responses regarding the actual and important subject of COVID-19 vaccines. We focus on this important subject since vaccines are now available, and the society urges to rapidly immunize the population.
Methods:
The proposed study is based on questions that were collected from the official World Health Organization website. These questions were submitted to the five dominant VAs (Alexa, Bixby, Cortana, Google Assistant and Siri), and responses were evaluated according to a rubric based on literature. We focus this study in Portuguese language as an additional contribution, since previous work are mainly focused in the English language, and we believe that VAs cannot be optimized to foreign languages.
Results:
Results show that Google Assistant has a better overall performance, and only this VA and Samsung Bixby achieved high scores on question understanding in the Portuguese language. Regarding the obtained answers, the study also shows the best Google Assistant overall performance.
Conclusions:
Under the urgent context of COVID-19 vaccination, this work can help to understand how VAs must be improved to be more useful to the society and how careful people must be when considering VAs as a source of health information. Although VAs show to perform well regarding comprehension and user-friendness, this work proves that they must be better integrated to information sources to be useful as health information tools.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.