AI enters the doctor's office

Microsoft's purchase of Nuance Communications for $19.7 billion, a software company that focuses on speech recognition through artificial intelligence, points to a future in which AI will be transcribing and analyzing voice conversations between doctors and patients. AI models can increasingly be trained on what we tell our doctors, now that they're starting to understand our written notes and even our conversations. That will open up new possibilities for care. "Eighty percent of health care data exists in text or narrative, and the doctor's note is still the primary way things get documented," says William Hogan, the director of biomedical information and data science at the UF College of Medicine.