Google Is Developing an AI That Can Transcribe Doctors’ Chicken Scratch

There are many universal experiences we share as human beings. One of those is getting a prescription from our doctor, and being unable to decipher it. Google is aware of this problem and is now working on AI technology that can do it for you.

The company announced at its annual conference in India that it’s currently working on this problem alongside pharmacists. As TechCrunch notes, it’s been an issue for decades, as doctors are infamous for hastily scribbling on a prescription pad. Exacerbating the issue is long and complex names for medications that are hard to read even when written perfectly. Google says prescriptions are notoriously difficult for computers to understand. “What makes prescriptions hard for computers to digitize is the same thing that makes them hard for you and me to read — they’re unstructured, in shorthand, and full of clues for pharmacists to decipher,” the company wrote on its blog.

The technology will require you to take a photo of the prescription or upload a photo of it. Once it’s been analyzed by the AI, specific medications listed in it will be highlighted. “This will act as an assistive technology for digitizing handwritten medical documents by augmenting the humans in the loop such as pharmacists, however no decision will be made solely based on the output provided by this technology,” Google said. As shown in the video above, in addition to identifying the medications, it also offers a text-to-voice pronunciation of them as well.

Google didn’t have much to say beyond this brief demo, so it seems like a product that’s still very early in development. Google merely says it’s a “state-of-the-art AI and machine learning model.” It says it’s just a research prototype for now.

This is yet another example of Google putting AI to work for non-evil solutions to real problems, which we applaud. It previously showed off a language translation AI it had built into a pair of regular glasses. The wearer could see augmented reality captions translated for them in real time. Google went from lab-to-field in just a few months and began testing them in August of this year.

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