Fieldnotes
Fieldnotes are digests of select aspects of the entrepreneurial landscape and are written by our Investment Team
An area of investment interest for us at Converge is “Verticalized AI”: the application of ML, deep learning and robotics to industries that, in our view, are ripe for disruption with AI. Healthcare is one of the several verticals we are studying closely and the intersection of voice and health tech is of particular interest.
There are a lot of general-purpose bot development frameworks including:
- Pandorabots
- wit.ai (owned by Facebook)
- api.ai (owned by Google)
- Gupshup
- Chatfuel
- Flow XO
- Botkit (open source)
However, verticalized voice applications are yet to emerge commercially – NLP still has limitations and is yet to “delight” the user but there is no question that NLP will keep improving. As that happens, we see no shortage of potential applications of conversational interfaces in healthcare: symptom diagnosis, medication adherence, post-discharge care, pre-appointment screening, prescription refills, appointment scheduling, personal health coaches, etc.
During our research of AI, voice and health, a few start-ups and grown-ups caught our eye…:
- Mabu by Cattalia Health: A physical robot designed to help patients with chronic disease adhere to their treatment
- Dr. A.I. by HealthTap: An “AI-enabled doctor” who helps people find a solution to the most common symptoms, based on personalized factors like medical history
- Voysis: A voice-as-a-service offering for online applications
- Microsoft HealthVault Bot: A bot built on top of Microsoft Health Vault, which is Microsoft’s competitor to Apple’s HealthKit, and
- Joy: A chatbot for tracking mental health.
We predict voice to have a dominant role in health, how about you? What are the companies at the intersection of voice and chat that you like? Let us know.
Nice chat.
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