Baidu Unveils Their Mobile AI Medical Advisor

Artificial Intelligence  

Baidu has released a voice translation app that users tell their symptoms and the app will send an immediate potential diagnostic suggestion.

In a  sign of the broad industry move tech firms are making applying artificial intelligence to the medical field, Chinese search engine company Baidu has released a voice translation app that works something like WebMD. Users can list off their symptoms to Ask-A-Doctor, and the app sends an immediate potential diagnostic suggestion.

Ask-A-Doctor can also link users to a nearby medical specialist.

"You’d rather have something like natural language — something you can talk to, [so] you can describe multiple symptoms at the same time. Our long-term goal is to build a medical robot."

Wei Fan, one of the Baidu researchers behind the project told Re/code the product can assess 520 different diseases, representing upward of 90 percent of the most common medical problems in China.

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“From a patient’s point of view, you’d rather have something like natural language — something you can talk to, [so] you can describe multiple symptoms at the same time,” he said. “Our long-term goal is to build a medical robot.”

A desktop version is now available, and Baidu plans to release the mobile app soon. Over time, Wei added, Baidu hopes to tie the product in with medical records in China, which are currently in the early stages of going digital.

A majority of Chinese users turn to their mobile device now as a primary source for health information, and voice search is far less cumbersome than text, especially when keying in Mandarin into a smartphone.

Ask-A-Doctor, is one of the earliest stealth Baidu projects to come out of their deep learning division headed by Andrew Ng, a former star researcher at Google.

SOURCE  Re/code

By 33rd Square

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