Google Teases AI Tool That Can Decipher Your Doctor’s Messy Handwriting

Thanks to a Google AI tool that can read difficult handwriting, you might finally be able to determine what your doctor’s messy prescription note says.

The feature, which will be rolled out on Google Lens, was developed in collaboration with pharmacists, Tech Crunch reports(Opens in a new window). It was announced(Opens in a new window) on Monday at the annual Google India conference in New Delhi, where an executive demonstrated(Opens in a new window) how the feature works.

Tweet(Opens in a new window)

It will allow users to either take a photo of the prescription or upload one from their phone’s image library. As shown above, the app then processes the image to detect the medicines mentioned in the note. 

The tool will act as an “assistive technology for digitizing handwritten medical documents by augmenting the humans in the loop such as pharmacists, however, no decision will be made solely based on the output provided by this technology,” Google said in a statement(Opens in a new window).

The system is currently under development; Google said it will announce details on a broader rollout at a later date.

As The Verge notes(Opens in a new window), Google Lens, its multipurpose object-recognition tool, can already transcribe handwritten notes, though messy handwriting is not legible.

At its conference, Google India also announced it’s working on a unified AI language model(Opens in a new window) that could work with over 100 Indian languages for both speech and text. The model is a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science, whose team “aims to collect anonymized speech data from people across 773 districts” in the country. 

Google has invested $1 million in grants to the Institute for a multidisciplinary center for Responsible AI. “This center will foster collective effort — involving not just researchers, but domain experts, developers, community members, policy makers and more – in getting AI right, and localizing it to the Indian context,” it says.