Evaluating Voice Assistants' Responses to COVID-19 Vaccination in Portuguese: Quality Assessment

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 aimed to perform a quality analysis of different VAs’ responses regarding the actual and important subject of COVID-19 vaccines. We focused on this important subject since vaccines are now available and society has urged for the population to be rapidly immunized. METHODS: The proposed study was based on questions that were collected from the official World Health Organization website. These questions were submitted to the 5 dominant VAs (Alexa, Bixby, Cortana, Google Assistant, and Siri), and responses were evaluated according to a rubric based on the literature. We focused this study on the Portuguese language as an additional contribution, since previous works are mainly focused on the English language, and we believe that VAs cannot be optimized to foreign languages. RESULTS: Results showed 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 showed 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. VAs have been demonstrated to perform well regarding comprehension and user-friendliness. However, this work has found that they must be better integrated to their information sources to be useful as health information tools.