Stefan Mileschin

Might as well ask the cat, implies new study

Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana offered first aid advice which was so bad the might as well have suggested a course of leeches a new study has suggested.

A new study from the University of Alberta, published Tuesday in the medical journal The BMJ, tested smart assistants Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google Assistant on their ability to respond helpfully to first aid questions. While Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa way outperformed Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, the results as a whole were underwhelming.

The researchers asked all of the smart assistants 123 questions on 39 first aid topics such as heart attacks, poisoning, and nose bleeds.

Google Assistant and Alexa recognized the topics over 90 per cent of the time and gave accurate and helpful responses in about half of those instances. Meanwhile, Siri and Cortana's responses were so poor that it "prohibited their analysis."

"Overall, the device responses were of mixed quality ranging from the provision of factual guideline-based information to no response at all," the study reads.

https://fudzilla.com/news/ai/50231-d...medical-advice