On Tuesday, October 16, 2018, dozens of digitally savvy individuals gathered at the Cambridge Innovation Center in Boston for the 2018 Voice Hackathon, an event offered in conjunction with the 2018 Voice.Health Summit hosted by Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH). Kudos to Michael Docktor, MD, and Kate Donovan, PhD, MBA, MS, co-founders of BCH Hacking Pediatrics, for creating such an inspiring...

The promising role of voice in healthcare took center stage just one week ago at the Boston Seaport World Trade Center thanks to Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH.) Visionary professionals from the BCH Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator planned and hosted an exceptional event, bringing together esteemed experts, entrepreneurs, and engineers – all focused on pioneering voice transformation...

In a recent post, I gave a hypothetical example showing how voice could be an effective tool in a variety of healthcare scenarios a single patient may experience. In this blog post, I’m going to discuss a recent clinical trial in which a voice assistant was used to monitor people with diabetes to study the usefulness of voice in a specific population.

Cell phone pocket calls occur every day, with the first “butt dial” likely happening shortly after the very first person thought it was a good idea to stuff his or her phone into a back pocket and sit.

In past posts, we’ve talked generally about the role of voice in healthcare. This post will be more specific. It will follow the journey of a patient who, at various points, requires information and some level of interaction with people and institutions in her healthcare sphere. This patient is living in the hopefully not-too-distance future when voice assistants play a larger role in...

Recently, Aging 2.0, a global network focused on a collaborative, lifestyle-oriented, opportunity-driven approach to aging, published information on eight areas that present the biggest challenges and opportunities for people to “age in place,” or stay in their homes as they get older.

Previous blog posts have noted that voice is a natural interface for communicating our thoughts and ideas. Recent innovations have made voice an obvious choice for interacting with computers and the internet. For the elderly and people who have dexterity or sight issues, using voice removes a barrier to accessing these staples of everyday life. As you can imagine, these are the same people who...

Say this question to yourself: Why voice? There. In the less than one second it took you to say it, you’ve answered the question. In this blog post, we’ll dig into the question, the answer, and why we believe voice is quickly becoming the new touch -- the next major interface.

Natural language refers to the way we, that is humans, communicate with each other.  Namely, speech and text. For computers, natural language used to be hard because it is messy, full of nuance and context. Only in the last few years has it been possible with deep Learning AI and Natural Language Processing to extract the meaning out of speech or text with high accuracy. Bots and Voice...

Over the last two years we’ve experienced the impact of voice assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home, which are providing a new channel for users to engage with their favorite applications such as the news, weather, sports, Wikipedia, Uber, Spotify, and Fitbit.  The internet of things (IoT) is enabling voice assistance to be embedded in products and is providing an easier way to engage...