“Alexa, Siri, Google, what do you know about corona?” A quantitative survey of voice assistants and content analysis of their answers on questions about the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The global corona crisis has increased people’s information seeking and their use of voice assistants as providers of current information on the pandemic. However, little is known regarding the kind and quality of information that different voice assistants provide on corona-related topics. Adapting previous studies in the domain of medical research for communication research, the current study presents the results of a quantitative content analysis of the responses of smartphone-based versions of the voice assistants Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant to 25 corona-related questions between March and May 2020 (N = 603 question-answer-sets). The findings reveal that the assistants were able to provide fitting answers to most of the questions, but that they struggled with questions requiring background information. Interestingly, instead of providing spoken answers to the questions, Google Assistant and Siri mainly displayed lists of search results, essentially making them voice-controlled search engines. Regarding the quality of fully spoken responses of the voice assistants, we found that, overall, the assistants relied on trustworthy sources. Still, the accuracy and correctness of Alexa’s spoken responses were superior to the responses that the other voice assistants provided. Generally, there were significant differences between the kind and quality of the answers of the different voice assistants. The findings provide genuine insights into the abilities of different voice assistants to serve as reliable and trustworthy information intermediaries in a pandemic.