Alexa, forget my grocery list and morning traffic reports. Tell me about CPR.
Alexa, Amazon's voice-activated digital assistant for the home, has learned a new skill — dispensing medical information about first aid from one of the best-known names in medicine, Minnesota's Mayo Clinic.
The information is accessible by speaking to the Amazon device, which users might appreciate if they're busy doing something with their hands, like putting aloe on a burn or examining someone who has stopped breathing.
Users who enable the free Mayo Clinic First Aid program and then ask Alexa for information about CPR are told, multiple times, to call 911. The device also advises in its robotic-female voice to begin cardiopulmonary resuscitation for one minute and then call 911 if the person is unresponsive from suffocation. If the user asks for it, the device will go on to discuss specific techniques for doing CPR on an adult, child or baby.
"We provide health information in a print newsletter, digital newsletter, desktop web, mobile web, Mayo Clinic app. We view this voice interface, specifically the Amazon Alexa application, as basically a new channel to provide that information," said Jay Maxwell, a senior director in health information with the Mayo Clinic Global Business Solutions, which developed Mayo Clinic First Aid.
Although the program includes a disclaimer that Mayo Clinic First Aid should not be used in a life-threatening medical emergency, "instructions for CPR" is one of the suggested topics in the program's description, along with "tell me about spider bites" and "how to treat a cut."
Online mega-retailer Amazon sells a variety of hands-free home assistant devices like the Echo and the Echo Dot that can listen to human voices and respond to commands like add eggs to the grocery list, check traffic or play streaming music. Alexa is a cloud-based system that responds directly to the user, similar to Apple's Siri program.
And just as apps can be downloaded at will for smartphones, Alexa-enabled devices can add new "skills" created by outside companies like the Pizza Hut program that can order a pie for delivery, or the U.S. Bank program that can securely check balances and recent credit card purchases.