How China's biggest search engine aims to fix a huge crisis in healthcare
11-Oct-16, CNBC
Baidu - China's biggest search engine - has introduced an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot to connect with patients, field medical questions and suggest diagnoses to doctors.
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The company is calling the bot - a new feature of the Baidu Doctor app it launched in 2015 - Melody the medical assistant. Baidu has developed advanced deep learning and natural language processing technologies to power Melody's artificially intelligent "brain".
The bot is designed to be the first port of call for a person feeling sick at home. A patient poses a health query to Melody, which responds with further questions, and compares responses with Baidu's database of medical information. All that data gets crunched, and Melody then poses a possible diagnosis to a doctor who can then recommend next steps.