
The Growing Potential of Voice AI in Healthcare
CIO Review APAC | Friday, March 10, 2023

Voice AI has already made significant progress in simplifying everyday tasks and providing innovative interfaces for users. However, its potential extends far beyond that, particularly in healthcare and mental health.
FREMONT, CA: The advent of voice AI has simplified and streamlined everyday tasks for millions of people. Phones can now be unlocked, apps launched, and contacts selected to make calls with automated voice assistants. Voice AI has simplified, sped up, made life easier, and led to greater efficiency, however, the potential of voice AI extends beyond everyday tasks, especially in healthcare.
Voice artificial intelligence helped healthcare providers screen patients and reduce the need for in-person treatment during the pandemic. Additionally, this technology enabled physicians with mundane tasks such as reminding patients to take their medications. As an advanced language model, ChatGPT assists in automating clinical documentation and offers virtual support to patients. Moreover, it provides current information on symptoms, pharmacological side effects, therapy availability, and therapeutic recommendations, eventually enhancing patient care and lowering physician burnout. The potential of voice AI combined with advanced language models such as ChatGPT to create new applications in healthcare is paving way for a better future.
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Several smart speakers such as Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod, and Google Home have come a long way in terms of providing entertainment and as an alternative interface to interact with the internet and perform functions like refilling prescriptions, fixing appointments, and managing digital lives. Automated speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) are driving applications across sectors, from healthcare documentation to building custom applications. Advances in natural language understanding (NLU) also alleviates physician burnout by automating clinical documentation and reducing the need for manual data entry.
Increasing customer engagement is expected to result from innovations in voice-based artificial intelligence chatbots. Large language models like GPT or BERT are poised to help fuel progress in this area. While text-based chatbots have been in use for decades, innovation in voice chatbots has been slower due to the availability of good data sets and variant dialects. The use of voice AI technology will improve as more data becomes available and voice data technology advances.
Voice assistants like Siri have walked users through the CDC's COVID-19 evaluation questions, and more healthcare providers are exploring the potential of voice AI. Patients are likely to expect prompt answers to their healthcare queries using intelligent voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home, which can provide up-to-date data on symptoms, drug adverse effects, therapy availability, and therapeutic recommendations.
Voice AI has the power to fundamentally alter how users perceive mental health. A person's acoustics often changes with their health. Audio qualities can be used to predict emotional state, stress, anxiety, sadness, memory, concussions, heart disease, and other ailments. The potential of voice AI in mental health is vast, and the technology is making a profound impact on how mental health conditions are diagnosed and treated.
Voice AI has already made significant progress in simplifying everyday tasks and providing innovative interfaces for users. The potential of voice AI, however, extends far beyond mundane tasks and into the healthcare industry, where it has already demonstrated its value during the pandemic. With the use of advanced language models like ChatGPT and automated speech recognition (ASR), voice AI has the potential to improve patient care, reduce physician burnout, and even alter how to diagnose and treat mental health conditions. As technology continues to advance and more data becomes available, the possibilities for voice AI are endless and can be expected to have an increasingly significant impact on well-being in the coming years.
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