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How Google Would Be Able to Interpret Your Doctor's Bad Writing

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By Augustine Mbam - - 5 Mins Read
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Tech giant Google is currently developing a tool to help users decipher the unclear handwriting of doctors or pharmacists. For the record, most prescriptions given by doctors are often unclear, and some people need to interpret what is written on these prescriptions very well. The Ai effect will help people interpret hard-to-read sentences that people find hard to understand.    It was during Google's annual conference in India that they made this announcement about the new AI model. The AI-powered machine learning model will decode messy or unclear handwriting whenever people want to read. While many people in different industries can use this tool, it was specifically designed for the health industry.    The product Google is about to launch is similar to Google Lenses, but there are still many differences between the two. Google Lenses is a tool produced by Google to help individuals to detect objects and text using their phone cameras. However, the major difference between the two is that Google Lenses depends on how legible handwriting is. At the same time, the new AI-powered machine learning model Google wants to launch can decrypt messy handwriting.    While the announcement about the new artificial intelligence tool has been announced, many details have been given about when it will be launched. Google has not also given insights on the platform where the AI effect will be available.    In a blog post, Google India said, "We announced today a state-of-the-art AI and machine learning model that can identify and even highlight medicines within handwritten prescriptions. 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.   While this system is currently under development, we look forward to sharing more updates on its broader rollout."

The New AI Has Many Potential In the Health Sector 

According to research by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), more than 1.5 million injuries happen in the medical field because of the poor interpretation of doctors' handwriting by pharmacists and other health professionals. With the introduction of the new artificial intelligence tool by Google, there's hope that this number will drastically reduce.    No matter how messy and unreadable a doctor’s handwriting is, it is expected that one of the new AI effects is to bring the horribly high digits down.    Google has made it clear that the new AI model won't be like what users have seen in the past, as in the case of Google Lenses. "You may be thinking, we’ve had the technology to interpret text from images for decades now: so what’s new, and what sets prescriptions apart? Ironically, 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 transformative power impact of AI is clear, but even more fundamental is the need to develop it responsibly. While we released our AI principles in 2018, we believe it is only possible to get them right via a collective effort with the broader ecosystem," Google added. With the new announcement, many professionals in the medical field will be waiting for when the technology will be fully rolled out to the public. 
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