The Rise of Chatbots in Healthcare Industry
Mounting pressure to cut costs and improve patient outcomes, combined with an explosion of available data, has resulted in a range of cutting-edge innovations. AI is creating powerful new opportunities across the industry, from the early diagnosis of diseases to the introduction of life-saving medicines. And the latest developments are similarly exciting.
Chatbots use natural language processing (NLP) — the same technology that is used to power Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri voice recognition systems — to effectively understand or interpret text and speech. We simulate human interaction through a user-friendly interface, either as a stand-alone tool or as a web application. Advances in NLP accuracy mean that chatbots are now sufficiently advanced to be combined with machine learning and used in healthcare settings.
A chatbot will either provide helpful advice on specific medical conditions or schedule an appointment with a clinician to assess the symptoms of a patient. If the bot is unable to react easily to the problems that have arisen, the patient will then be moved to a real person. Sometimes, a substantial amount of unnecessary visits to primary healthcare facilities may be phased out by making chatbots the first point of contact and automating the triage process, thus dramatically lowering costs.
Customization
Organizations can customize chatbots to decipher various languages, voice patterns, and text trends. Chatbots can simplify communication with a variety of interaction modes. Computer vision can, for example, be altered for an person with visual impairment. NLP chatbots can be useful for people with speech disabilities. Another impressive advancement of chatbots that we’ll see soon is that of Emotion AI. Soon, the bots will recognize the user ‘s feelings based on text, voice, or sentence structure!
