Google is developing assistive technology that will be incorporated into the ‘Google lens’ and will help pharmacists decipher prescriptions written by doctors in sloppy handwriting. A Google executive demonstrated the feature that will let customers upload images from the library or take pictures of prescriptions. The app will analyze the image and highlight the listed medications.
The feature is currently a research prototype and is being developed with the help of pharmacists. Once launched, the feature will let users decode prescriptions, however, the decision will not be made solely based on the output. The margin of error by humans in decoding prescriptions is abnormally high, so it will be interesting to see how AI will handle this. Google hasn’t revealed the timeline for exactly when this function will be available to the masses.
Google revealed that India is the home to most lens users in the world. The company shared that they are working on a single unified model that will cover over 100 regional languages of India for speech and text recognition.
“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.” the company issued the statement.
The tech giant held a ‘Google for India’ event on December 19th, 2022. Indian-origin CEO Sundar Pichai spoke at the event. He met the Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Modi, and Telecom and IT minister Ashwini Vaishnav. Twinkle Khanna, former actor, author, and columnist interviewed him and the duo discussed the advent of AI and its effect on the future.
Google also announced two new features including YouTube Courses and auto-dubbing of healthcare videos.
