Canary Speech, maker of speech analysis software, is collaborating with Microsoft is using the tech giant’s AI technology to extend its machine learning language models for healthcare.
Canary offers voice biomarker technology that collects and analyzes data to determine if there are irregularities in a person’s speech. The company touts its technology to detect mood, stress and energy levels before clinical exams and before symptoms are apparent. It also says it could potentially improve telemedicine and long-distance medical services.
Through the collaboration, Canary will become a co-selling partner of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, leveraging Microsoft AI to accelerate speech analytics technology to reduce healthcare costs, address mental health challenges, and scale remote patient monitoring solutions.
The company will also use Microsoft Azure to extend its machine learning language models to new customers, and Canary’s API platform has been integrated with Microsoft Teams.
“AI is helping to empower healthcare providers by automating tasks, transforming unstructured forms of data into structured formats, gaining patient insights, and assisting physicians in delivering personalized patient care,” says Dr. David Rhew, Microsoft’s global chief medical officer and vice president of healthcare, said in a statement.
“Canary Speech uses AI to use voice as biometrics, which could potentially help in disease investigation and monitoring. We are excited to partner with Canary to transform care through AI technology that can positively impact health industry and patient outcomes.”
THE BIGGER TREND
Microsoft has caused a stir in the healthcare industry with its AI technology.
The tech giant took over last year Nuance Communications, which offers AI and speech recognition software, for around $16 billion. It also significant investments made in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and GPT-4, its successor.
OpenAI released the latest version, GPT-4, in March. In the same month, Microsoft Nuance Communications announced a new clinical documentation tool, Dragon Ambient eXperience Express, utilizing the latest version of OpenAIs Artificial Intelligence Language Model, GPT-4.
DAX Express creates clinical notes from telemedicine or in-person conversations with patients in seconds. The product builds on its DAX documentation product introduced in 2020.
Microsoft is also using AI in other speech recognition projects, including as part of a coalition with tech giants Amazon, Meta, Apple and Google as well as with non-profit partners.
In October, the partners announced a collaboration with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to expand language skills for people with disabilities Speech accessibility projectwhich would collect speech samples from people with different speech patterns to help train machine learning models to identify different speech patterns.
