How voice assistants can provide medical advice

Ben Fox Rubin had a great post in CNET's CES blog that discussed whether voice assistants were equipped to provide health and emotional support. He starts out by citing a JAMA study from early 2016 that found voice assistants mostly lacking when asked about some basic physical and mental health situations. Voice assistants were designed to help execute tasks, remind users of important items, fetch information, and make entertainment more readily accessible. These all require integration with other services to fulfill user needs. That is a core selling point for Mycroft, an open source voice assistant platform.