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      Responses to addiction help-seeking from Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Bixby intelligent virtual assistants

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          Abstract

          We investigated how intelligent virtual assistants (IVA), including Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Samsung’s Bixby, responded to addiction help-seeking queries. We recorded if IVAs provided a singular response and if so, did they link users to treatment or treatment referral services. Only 4 of the 70 help-seeking queries presented to the five IVAs returned singular responses, with the remainder prompting confusion (e.g., “did I say something wrong?”). When asked “help me quit drugs” Alexa responded with a definition for the word drugs. “Help me quit…smoking” or “tobacco” on Google Assistant returned Dr. QuitNow (a cessation app), while on Siri “help me quit pot” promoted a marijuana retailer. IVAs should be revised to promote free, remote, federally sponsored addiction services, such as SAMSHA’s 1-800-662-HELP helpline. This would benefit millions of IVA users now and more to come as IVAs displace existing information-seeking engines.

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          Treating tobacco use and dependence: 2008 update U.S. Public Health Service Clinical Practice Guideline executive summary.

          (2008)
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            Smartphone-Based Conversational Agents and Responses to Questions About Mental Health, Interpersonal Violence, and Physical Health.

            Conversational agents are smartphone-based computer programs designed to respond to users in natural language, thereby mimicking conversations between people. Many people use their smartphones to obtain health information.
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              Tobacco quitlines: looking back and looking ahead.

              Telephone based tobacco cessation services, or quitlines, have become central components of many comprehensive tobacco control programmes. This paper provides an overview of their history, noting milestones in the growth of quitlines. Key factors in their worldwide adoption were solid evidence from clinical trials with large community samples and strong backing from public health officials. Quitlines are now available throughout most of North America, Europe, Australia and in many other locations around the world. The paper also offers several recommendations for future directions in quitline practice and research. Benchmarks should be established for key areas of quitline implementation, such as accessibility, quality and cost efficiency. Advances in pharmacotherapy, telephony and web based applications should be investigated for opportunities to expand service offerings. Research and development are needed to determine how best to serve a diverse clientele in the most cost effective manner. Funding should be expanded and diversified to enable quitlines to serve much larger numbers of users. Healthcare providers should be targeted for quitline promotion, to engage them in a broad effort to increase the number of patients receiving cessation messages from clinicians. The goal of quitline promotion should expand to include an increase in unaided quit attempts in the population. Early research findings were quickly adopted in quitline practice, and future research to answer questions that have arisen through the implementation of quitlines will probably also find quick adoption.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                ayers.john.w@gmail.com
                Journal
                NPJ Digit Med
                NPJ Digit Med
                NPJ Digital Medicine
                Nature Publishing Group UK (London )
                2398-6352
                29 January 2020
                29 January 2020
                2020
                : 3
                : 11
                Affiliations
                [1 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2107 4242, GRID grid.266100.3, The Center for Data Driven Health at Qualcomm Institute, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, , University of California San Diego, ; La Jolla, CA USA
                [2 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2107 4242, GRID grid.266100.3, Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health, Department of Medicine, , University of California San Diego, ; La Jolla, CA USA
                [3 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2107 4242, GRID grid.266100.3, Division of Health Policy, Department of Family Medicine & Public Health, , University of California San Diego, ; La Jolla, CA USA
                [4 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1936 9668, GRID grid.5685.e, Department of Health Sciences, , University of York, ; York, UK
                [5 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2107 4242, GRID grid.266100.3, Division of Behavioral Medicine, Department of Family Medicine & Public Health, , University of California San Diego, ; La Jolla, CA USA
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0472-3671
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3498-9032
                Article
                215
                10.1038/s41746-019-0215-9
                6989668
                32025572
                dbe2b3a2-c06d-4999-8c70-4f6c9c8ea17b
                © The Author(s) 2020

                Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 13 August 2019
                : 21 October 2019
                Funding
                Funded by: FundRef https://doi.org/10.13039/100005188, Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP);
                Award ID: 587873
                Award Recipient :
                Categories
                Brief Communication
                Custom metadata
                © The Author(s) 2020

                epidemiology,rehabilitation
                epidemiology, rehabilitation

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