The big news in voice tech in 2022 was that the Amazon division that built Alexa smart speaker was on track to lose $10 billion as reported by Insider in November. What does this mean for voice tech in healthcare?

The promise of voice is great: doctors speak to their patients, while their words get correctly transcribed, interpreted and recorded in a structured way in a clinical system. No more long hours spent on typing clinical notes on the computer. While this may seem futuristic, it’s actually already in use in some places.

In this discussion, recorded at HLTH 2022, Punit Singh Soni, CEO of Suki, provides doctors with an AI-powered voice assistant for healthcare designed to save doctors time and energy, shared how Suki works, how it translates text to structured data, and how clinically risky is to rely on AI to correctly interpret medication names which can very quickly sound alike. 

Where is voice tech in 2023

Voice technology and voice recognition could be roughly divided into three areas, says Punit Singh Soni: 

1. the past generation of voice technologies, which primarily offer speech recognition, such as the market leader Nuance, which primarily focuses on transcriptions,

2. the new ambient technology, which involves human transcribers; and doesn’t scale well,

3. digital assistant technology, which uses AI to understand the intent of the speaker. 

The biggest issue for voice tech and NLP, says Punit Singh Sonu, is not specialty phrases; it’s regular English. “The problem typically happens not in medical terminology. It happens in regular English.  I'll give you a very funny example. The doctor would just say “bilateral knee,” and it would actually understand it as “Beyonce Knowles”. Regular English is where speech recognition trips and falls in, in specific medical terminology,” he explained. 

This episode is a part of the short series about NLP and health tech, and was recorded at HLTH 2022. Read more in the newsletter:

Tune in to the full episode on iTunes or Spotify.