Amazon is set to expand its automatic transcription service for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon Transcribe, its automatic transcription service for AWS, to involve assistance for medical speech. This was announced recently by the company at its AWS. The new machine, as Amazon claims, is a learning-powered service called Amazon Transcribed Medical. Its main function is to allow physicians to dictate their speech and clinical notes quickly into the exact text in real-time minus any human intervention. The new machine learning-powered service, Amazon Transcribe Medical, will allow physicians to quickly dictate their clinical notes and speech into accurate text in real-time, without any human intervention, Amazon claims.
The Amazon Transcribe Medical is different from the other services where the medical practitioners don't have to say things such as "full stop" or "comma" but talk normally during the dictation process. As part of the said process, the text can be "fed to downstream systems," which include the AWS language services or the E.R. systems such as the Amazon Comprehend Medical for individual extraction.
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How the Amazon Service Works
From the technical point of view, Amazon's speech recognition service works by capturing the audio via the microphone of the device. Then, send PCM audio to a streaming platform, also known as the API, as based on the WebSocket protocol. This API, in return, responds with the JSON blog series along with the transcribed texts and the word-level punctuation and time stamps. This can be selectively saved, too, in a bucket called the Amazon Simple Storage Service (3).
Amazon Transcribe Medical, which is derived from the 2017 debut of Amazon Transcribe, takes place at a time when there is an increase in investments of Amazon in the medical field, specifically in terms of voice technology with medicine. For instance, a week ago, Amazon introduced the medication management Alexa that lets the consumers make voice requests for medication reminders and refills.
Amazon's Strong Initiative to Push Speech Recognition Service
Amazon has made it possible, too, for the Alexa voice apps to be compliant with HIPAA. It also acquired startups in the health industry, such as the Health Navigator and PillPack. Moreover, Amazon launched the Amazon Care, the company's own healthcare service for employees, and, it has piloted the use of Alexa voice apps in a hospital setup. Incidentally, the Alexa voice assistant is very flexible that it is available for nearly every smartphone for Android. Say, you already have Bixby or Google Assistant on your phone, this service is worthy of having more particularly if you already have a compatible device like those from the Echo Show set.
When it comes to speech recognition in the healthcare industry, Amazon is not alone. In fact, this is an area that Google has been working in, as well, along with Google Brain and Microsoft, it has established other players too, such as Philips and Nuance that also offers voice recognition service. A wide range of similar business startups has started offering the said tech service, too. Meanwhile, the Amazon Transcribe Medical is first available in the U.S. (East, north Virginia), and the U.S. West regions, particularly, Oregon.
