AI is a cool technology for creating cringy internet content and boiling down your lengthy emails, but its utility goes far beyond that. It can be used for some serious health applications. While Google has made some serious missteps with its AI, the company wants its AI to help you stay healthy. Google’s AI may detect when you’re sick one day.
Speaking of Google’s AI, the company just recently launched some new tools to make Gemini more useful. It launched a new feature that will let Gemini see what’s on your screen and give you answers based on what it sees. It also launched another feature that lets you ask questions about YouTube videos and get answers.
These features are now live for the latest version of the Google Gemini app on Android. You can download the app today for free.
Google’s AI could detect when you’re sick
This isn’t a new Gemini feature that’s hitting the app, and you won’t see it in use any time soon. Google partnered with Salcit Technologies, an Indian tech company, to help use its AI technology to detect the early signs of sickness.
It wants to achieve this by using audio samples. It will use bioacoustics to help fuel this technology. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, developed a foundation model that was trained on more than 300 million audio samples of common sounds of sickness. These include sniffles, coughs, sneezes, and breathing. It obtained these samples from sources such as audio recorded in a Zambia hospital and YouTube videos.
One application that the companies plan to use this for is the early detection of tuberculosis. Salcit Technologies is using this model to help detect this disease. It combined Google’s model, which is called HeAR (Health Acoustic Representations), and its own model called Swassa to help detect early signs.
In India, it can be tough to get proper treatment for this disease in most areas. So, many people go undiagnosed each year, and that results in countless deaths from a treatable disease. The model will use your phone’s microphone as a screening device. You’ll record yourself coughing into the microphone. Then, the model will be able to detect diseases with 94% accuracy. That’s really impressive, and it’s already being used by Apollo Hospitals and the nonprofit Healing Fields Foundation.
Google wants to partner with other companies to potentially help them screen for other diseases like breast cancer.