A large number of doctors write medicine prescriptions in haste, making it nearly not possible for their patients to understand what they scribbled. This problem has been around for decades and several companies have tried to solve the issue but with little to no success.
Now Google is having a go at translating those unfathomable texts. The search engine giant announced at its annual conference in India Monday that it is working with pharmacists to explore ways to decipher the handwriting of doctors.
Google Lens will roll out a feature that allows users to take a photo of their prescriptions or upload one from their photo library. Once the image is processed, the app detects and highlights the medicines mentioned in the note, a Google executive demonstrated.
“This 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,” the company said in a statement.
Google for India, the annual event of the company in South Asia, showcases many new developments for the region. Google for India also stated that it is developing a single, unified model that will cover more than 100 Indian languages for both speech and text.
India is a key market for Google, which has amassed over half a billion users in the country. But it’s also been one of the toughest years for Google in the South Asian market, where it has been slapped twice by India’s antitrust regulator in recent months.
