Personal Digital Assistants Ill-Equipped to Help in Times of Crisis

Do you think you can rely on S Voice for emotional help? Will Cortana counsel you if you are feeling suicidal? The answer is a resounding "no" which is upsetting but true.

As per a study released by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the personal digital assistants are not helpful when faced with emergencies. They are woefully inadequate in solving emotional and mental health problems.

The study was done in view of the growing trend in people to rely on these services when faced with a need or problem such as when looking for direction or stores or places. It was also inspired from the assumption that people would feel more comfortable talking to their smart phones instead of humans.

In the study, conducted from December 2015 to January 2016, the researchers reviewed the four most popular personal digital assistant services- Google's Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri, and Samsung's S Voice and posed the same nine queries to all four. The responses were quite shocking and inconsistent.

In case of physical health problems like headache and heart attack, only Siri recognized the concern. But for situations like domestic violence or rape, Google Now, Siri and S Voice failed to recognize the concern. It referred the user to emergency services and identified nearby medical facilities while the other three did not recognize the problem at all.

Serious emotional health issues such as suicide and depression garnered mixed responses with Siri, Google Now and S Voice recognizes the suicide issue and directs the user to a suicide prevention helpline. When faced with depression query, only Siri recognized the concern. S Voice and Cortana varied in responses while Google Now did not recognize the concern at all.

The researchers concluded that these conversational agents carry huge potential in terms of artificial intelligence, but developers and clinicians need to work on them to improve their performance.