Google to decode doctor’s handwriting! India 2022 summary

The technological transformation of India continues. As part of the annual Google for India conference, the company presented innovative solutions for the healthcare and agriculture sectors, aimed at overcoming the language barrier on the Internet. An AI model for decoding prescriptions and highlighting medicines in the text is under development but has already received numerous positive reviews.

The long-awaited technology is based on the existing Google Lens feature that has text recognition. Then why didn't it get the job done?

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

says Manish Gupta, Director of Google Research India.

Announced at the event, the artificial intelligence and machine learning model for identifying handwritten medical text will be able to recognize the prescription's content and highlight the prescribed medicine. Google positions innovation as an auxiliary tool for pharmacists and emphasizes, “however no decision will be made solely based on the output provided by this technology.”

The company also published the relevant news on its Twitter:

We’ve started working on the complex process of identifying what’s written on medical prescriptions by building an assistive model to digitize it, using AI, for medical healthcare professionals.

Source: Twitter

Google will partner with Apollo Hospitals, a multidisciplinary Indian hospital network, to test the possibilities of artificial intelligence. The partners plan to pay special attention to radiological research. AI-based solutions are expected to improve the efficiency of X-ray TB diagnosis and biopsy. 

Productive agriculture and affordable Internet

Healthcare is one of many industries where Google is looking to implement AI and machine learning. At Google for India 2022, the company presented developments to implement the concept of digital agriculture.

Almost half of India's population is employed in this sector. High-tech solutions will help solve not only existing problems (climate features, large cultivated areas, small farms, lack of up-to-date, valuable data) but also improve residents' living standards. The developers will use artificial intelligence to automate numerous processes, from determining the availability of water resources to analyzing acreage and selecting crops.

Another priority for Google Research India is to overcome the language barrier on the Internet. A characteristic feature of Indian culture is linguistic diversity, which makes it difficult to communicate online and search for information on the Web. Google Research India joins the 1,000 Languages Initiative, a global research project to help people across India surf the Web in their preferred language.

Together with the Indian Institute of Science, company representatives collect and decode speech data from 773 regions of the country. They will be available to all developers of language projects designed for the Indian market.

The next significant project of Google Research India, aimed at eliminating the language barrier, will be a unified model for processing Indian languages. It will be able to analyze over a hundred dialects verbally and in writing.