In a hurry, doctors often write in a hurry, which makes their handwriting unreadable for ordinary mortals. And if some doctors now write their prescriptions, there are still a good number who write them the old way.
Fortunately, Google thinks of all those who have already struggled to decipher what the doctor writes on these prescriptions. Indeed, the firm is working on a new artificial intelligence that will be able to read the writings of doctors for us.
Google’s new challenge: doctors’ writings
The new project was announced by the firm at its annual conference in India. As a reminder, Google already has technology capable of reading inscriptions on images (you can copy text from a photo using Google Lens). But reading doctors’ handwriting will be a more complicated task.
In any case, when the new feature is available on Google Lens, it will allow you to scan a prescription with the camera. And Google’s algorithms will take care of identifying the drugs mentioned on this prescription. “We started working on the complex process of identifying what is written on medical prescriptions by creating an assistive model to digitize it, using AI, for healthcare professionals”can we read on a publication of the Indian Twitter account of Google.
We’ve started working on the complex process of identifying what’s written on medical prescriptions by building an assistive model to digitize it, using AI, for medical healthcare professionals.#GoogleForIndia pic.twitter.com/XD8YwJ6HBr
— Google India (@GoogleIndia) December 19, 2022
A project in progress, no date is mentioned
At this time, it’s unclear when the technology will be available to the general public. And we do not know in which countries it will be available. In any case, until all doctors write their prescriptions on computers, this feature could be of great use for patients, but also for certain pharmacists (who may also have trouble deciphering doctors’ handwriting).
As TechCrunch reports, India is now a very important market for Google, since the firm has half a billion users there. The firm took advantage of its annual conference to announce that it will also develop a unified artificial intelligence model that will cover the 100 languages used in the country.
Otherwise, globally, Google is currently working on Google Translate to support over 1,000 languages.
