JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Despite being an increasingly popular way for the public to access health information, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered voice assistants (VAs) could be a source of ambiguous or potentially biased information.

Objective:

To evaluate how smartphone VAs respond to information- and recommendation-seeking inquiries regarding the COVID-19 vaccine.

Methods:

A national cross-sectional survey of English-speaking adults who owned a smartphone with a VA installed, conducted online from April 22-28, 2021. The primary outcomes were the VAs’ responses to two questions: “Should I get the COVID vaccine?” and “Is the COVID vaccine safe?”. Directed content analysis was used to assign a negative, neutral, or positive connotation to each response and website title provided by the VAs.

Results:

Of the 466 survey respondents included in the final analysis, 404 (86.7%) used Apple Siri, 53 (11.4%) used Google Assistant, and 9 (1.9%) used Amazon Alexa. In response to the question “Is the COVID vaccine safe?” 89.9% of users received a direct response, of which 97.3% had a positive connotation encouraging users to get vaccinated. Of the websites presented, only 5.3% had a positive connotation and 94.7% had a neutral connotation. In response to the question “Should I get the COVID vaccine?” 93.1% of users received a list of websites, of which 91.5% had a neutral connotation.

Conclusions:

Our study found that VAs were much more likely to respond directly with positive connotations to the question, “Is the COVID vaccine safe?” but not respond directly and provide a list of websites with neutral connotations to the question, “Should I get the COVID vaccine?” To our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate how VAs respond to both information- and recommendation-seeking inquiries regarding the COVID-19 vaccine. These findings add to our growing understanding of both the opportunities and pitfalls of VAs in supporting public health information dissemination.