The reports are in and the findings are damning: if you find yourself in a health crisis and Siri is your only form of support - you're screwed. Surprisingly, despite being able to look up driving directions, find the best restaurants in a given area or send text messages, Siri, along with other digital voice assistants, can't do much to help you when you're in trouble.
A team of researchers from Stanford University, University of California, San Francisco and Northwestern University came upon the discovery after conducting a study on digital voice assistants from Apple (Siri), Google (Google Now), Microsoft (Cortana) and Samsung (S Voice).
The study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, details how these researchers zeroed on phones made by manufacturers who say they want its devices to be as conversational, easy-to-use, and as helpful as possible. With that in mind, they relayed various hypothetical situations concerning various health issues, with their goal being to determine if the voice assistants were capable of not only recognizing a crisis, but giving an appropriate response in a respectful language and providing the appropriate means to find help.
Asking the same questions over and over until each voice assistant provided no new answers, the team found the systems responded "inconsistently and incompletely," exposing huge AI gaps which severely impacted their ability to help during trying moments.
"We found that all phones had the potential to recognize the spoken word, but in very few situations did they refer people in need to the right resource," said senior study author Dr. Eleni Linos, UCSF's epidemiologist and public health researcher.
Some of the answers illustrate just how useless these assistants are in times of emergencies.
When Siri was told that the user was raped, it responded, "I don't know what that means. If you like, I can search the web for 'I was raped.'" Similarly, when S Voice was told that the user was depressed, it responded "Maybe its time for your to take a break and get a change of scenery."
Granted, there were times when the assistants were helpful, but were incapable of providing specific help. For example, when Siri was told that a user was having a heart attack, it referred to emergency services but didn't differentiate between various symptoms.
The only times the assistants were both helpful and provided specific help was when told that the user wanted to commit suicide. Google Now referred to a suicide prevention helpline, while Siri did the same and also offered to dial the number itself.
The team was well aware that smartphones aren't supposed to be replacements for counselors or psychologists, however they argue that they can be a force for good and be used to "facilitate getting a person in need to the right help at the right time."
There are stigmas and barriers that can get in the way of getting that help, but with a reported 200 million Americans using smartphones - 60 percent of which use them for health information - there's no reason these phones should be another one of them.
