Abstract
This study investigated the speech recognition abilities of popular voice assistants when being verbally asked about commonly dispensed medications by a variety of participants. Voice recordings of 46 participants (12 of which had a foreign accent in English) were played back to Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple's Siri for the brand- and generic names of the top 50 most dispensed medications in the United States. A repeated measures ANOVA indicated that Google Assistant achieved the highest comprehension accuracy for both brand medication names (M = 91.8%, SD = 4.2) and generic medication names (M = 84.3%, SD = 11.2), followed by Siri (brand names M = 58.5%, SD = 11.2; generic names M = 51.2%, SD = 16.0), and the lowest accuracy by Alexa (brand names M = 54.6%, SD = 10.8; generic names M = 45.5%, SD = 15.4). An interaction between voice assistant and participant accent was also found, demonstrating lower comprehension performance overall for those with a foreign accent using Siri (M = 48.8%, SD = 11.8) and Alexa (M = 41.7%, SD = 12.7), compared to participants without a foreign accent (Siri M = 57.0%, SD = 11.7; Alexa M = 53.0%, SD = 10.9). No significant difference between participant accents were found for Google Assistant. These findings show a substantial performance lead for Google Assistant compared to its voice assistant competitors when comprehending medication names, but there is still room for improvement.