Canary Speech, maker of speech analysis software, partners with Microsoft to apply the tech giant’s artificial intelligence technology to scale its machine learning voice models for healthcare.
Canary offers voice biomarker technology that captures and analyzes data to determine if there are any irregularities in an individual’s speech. The company touts its technology as being able to detect mood, stress and energy levels before clinical screenings and before symptoms are noticeable. It also indicates that it can potentially improve telemedicine and remote medical services.
Through this collaboration, Canary will be a Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare co-selling partner and will use Microsoft AI to accelerate speech analytics technology to reduce healthcare costs, address mental health challenges and make evolve remote patient monitoring solutions.
The company will also use Microsoft Azure to extend its machine learning voice models to new customers, and Canary’s API platform has been integrated with Microsoft Teams.
“AI helps empower healthcare providers by automating tasks, transforming unstructured forms of data into structured formats, gleaning patient insights, and helping clinicians deliver personalized patient care” , said Dr. David Rhew, global medical director and vice president of healthcare at Microsoft, said in a statement.
“Canary Speech is applying AI to enable voice to serve as biometrics, which could potentially help in the screening and monitoring of medical conditions. We are excited to work with Canary to help transform care through technology in AI that can positively impact the industry and patient outcomes.”
THE GREAT TREND
Microsoft has been making waves in the healthcare industry with its artificial intelligence technology.
Last year, the tech giant acquired Communications Shades, which provides AI and voice recognition software, for about $16 billion. This too made significant investments in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, as well as GPT-4, its successor.
OpenAI revealed the latest iteration, GPT-4, in March. That same month, Microsoft Communications Shades announced a new clinical documentation tool, Dragon Ambient eXperience Express, which uses the latest version of Open AI artificial intelligence language model, GPT-4.
DAX Express writes clinical notes in seconds from conversations with patients conducted over telehealth or in person. The product relies on its DAX documentation product which launched in 2020.
Microsoft is also using AI for speech recognition in other projects, including through a coalition with tech giants Amazon, Meta, Apple And Googleand with non-profit partners.
In October, the partners announced a collaboration with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to extend the speech abilities of people with disabilities via the Voice Accessibility Projectwhich would collect speech samples from individuals with various speech patterns to help train machine learning models to identify various speech patterns.