can read doctors’ handwriting

Doctors’ handwriting is not just a problem for patients in Romania. It seems that doctors in all countries around the world work the same way, and their hastily written prescriptions are hard to decipher in all languages, not just Romanian. Google saw an opportunity to put AI to work in this area and has developed an algorithm that specialises in recognising doctors’ handwriting, to decipher the drugs on prescriptions and the administration schedule.

Google announced the new Lens feature in India

Google has announced this capability of its AI algorithms as a part of Google Lens, the AI app that can translate in real time or quickly recognise objects it photographs. Of course, you can also use a photo from the gallery for text recognition if you already have a photo and don’t have the recipe handy.

The AI has been trained on doctors’ handwriting and has a database of medications at its disposal to correctly identify the contents of prescriptions.

The announcement was made at a conference called Google for India. Apparently this country is very important to the company, as more functionality is coming to the country faster. Incidentally, Google also announced alongside doctor handwriting recognition that it plans to develop a language AI that can recognize all of India’s 100+ languages.

It’s unclear when the feature in Google Lens will be released, but given that it was demonstrated live on stage, it could be released in the next few months. However, regarding availability, it will probably start in India and then expand to other markets.