@article{2022:frehmann:alexa_,
title = {“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},
year = {2022},
note = {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.},
journal = {SCM Studies in Communication and Media},
pages = {278--303},
author = {Frehmann, Katharina and Ziegele, Marc and Rosar, Ulrich},
volume = {11},
number = {2}
}