Telephone counseling has been extensively tested and recommended by the Clinical Practice Guidelines. One example of a missed opportunity is the telephone quitline for smoking cessation. Altogether, the IVAs’ responses to substance use help-seeking requests are a missed opportunity for promoting referrals to substance use treatment. Indeed, Siri’s referral to a marijuana retailer demonstrates that IVAs could be detrimental rather than helpful. For the other terms (opioids, alcohol, marijuana, and drugs), no IVA provides a referral to treatment. Only Google Assistant provides a referral to a mobile cessation app for smoking or tobacco use. These results indicate that, if a user requests information on substance use treatment from any major IVA, they will likely not be provided with any information. QuitNow (a mobile cessation app) for “help me quit…smoking or tobacco”.Īmong 70 addiction help-seeking queries presented to the five leading IVAs, only four queries elicited singular responses (one promoting a marijuana retailer) and only two queries linked to remote treatment or treatment referral programs. 8 Only 2 of the 25 queries for tobacco returned singular results, with Google Assistant linking users to Dr. Want to try that one?” directing users to a local marijuana retailer. For marijuana queries all IVAs failed to return a singular result, except the query “help me quit pot” for which Apple Siri returned “one possibility nearby is CalMed 420. All queries for alcohol and opioids across all IVAs failed to return any singular result, yielding confusion (e.g., Microsoft Cortana “I’m sorry. The results were similar regardless of the substance cited in our queries (Table (Table1). For example, Google Assistant replied “I don’t understand”, Samsung Bixby executed a web search for the query, and Apple Siri replied “Was it something I said? I’ll go away if you say ‘goodbye’ ”. When presented with the query “help me quit drugs”, only Amazon Alexa provided a singular response by defining the term drugs: “A drug is any substance that when inhaled, injected, smoked, consumed… causes a physiological change in the body…” No other IVA provided a singular response, including Apple Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana. We performed an analysis of IVA responses to addiction help-seeking queries related to drugs and alcohol to assess what treatment resources, if any, are being promoted. 7 Given the stigmatized nature of substance use disorder, IVAs could confidentially direct those in need to remote substance use resources. Over 47,000 people died from an opioid overdose in 2017. One of America’s most pressing public health emergencies is substance use disorder. Another study 6 found that when asked a variety of health-related queries (i.e., queries originated by study participants and standard queries related to medication and emergency scenarios developed by researchers), IVAs directed users to take actions that could result in harm or death. 4, 5 One study 4 found smartphone IVAs inconsistently recognized suicide-related queries with responses failing to direct users to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Yet, public health has done little to harness or study these technologies.

For example, querying “what’s the weather?” on a search engine would return multiple links from different weather services, but an IVA is designed to return a singular result-the current, local forecast.Īlready half of US adults (46%) use IVAs 3 and companies are substantially invested in the proliferation of IVAs. 2 In contrast, traditional search engines return millions of relevant results to a query, relying on the user to collate the results and reach a conclusion. 1 IVAs are interfaces that enable users to interact with smart devices using spoken language in a natural way and provide a singular response to a query similar to speaking to a person.

Intelligent virtual assistants (IVA), such as Apple’s Siri, are transforming how the public seeks and finds information.

Anylist siri fails to respond