Google Assistant knows more about medicine than Siri and Alexa
When it comes to obtaining information or managing the smart home, Apple, Google and Amazon are able to provide excellent help thanks to their sophisticated voice assistants based on artificial intelligence. But when it comes to saving lives? A study confirms that the three tech giants still have a lot of work to do, even if Google is one step ahead of the other two.
The first step towards a future in which voice assistants may be able to help care for people, or medicine in general, is to understand exactly what each user communicates to them. Unfortunately, a new study conducted by Klick Health and published in Nature Digital Medicine reveals that both Siri and Alexa are continually struggling to recognize the names of drugs commonly available in the United States.
For those unfamiliar with it, Klick Health is the largest medical science marketing agency, named Agency of the Year six times in the past seven years and has won prestigious awards such as the Lions Health Awards.
This research gave Apple’s artificial intelligence an overall accuracy score of 58.5% for drug names, as well as 51.2% in terms of correct identification of generic drug names. Although this means that Siri is able to understand once in two, the average is not at all impressive for a software almost 8 years old.
The same applies to Alexa: Amazon’s assistant achieved even lower accuracy rates of 54.6% and 45.5%, respectively. On the contrary, Google Assistant wiped out the competition, correctly identifying drug names in 84.3% of cases and “guessing” brand names for 91.8%. It may not be absolute perfection, but it is another of the areas where the assistant created by Google dominates over the others.
This is certainly not a surprise: Google’s AI has clearly crushed both Alexa and Siri several times, especially in understanding questions of various kinds. In summary, if you need information about medication, ask Google, Amazon or Siri to call your doctor.
Which voice assistant do you usually use?
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