Google announced yesterday, during a special event held in India, that it is working with pharmacists to understand the handwriting in which doctors write their prescriptions.
Many doctors write prescriptions in a hurry, making it almost impossible for their patients to understand what they have written. This problem has been around for decades, and many tech companies have tried to solve it with little success. And now, the American tech giant is working on translating those texts that can’t be understood.
Google explained that the feature, which will be introduced in its Google Lens service, will allow users to either take a picture of a prescription or upload one from a photo library. Once the image is processed, the app detects and highlights the medicines mentioned in the prescription.
“This will be an assistive technology to digitize handwritten medical documents by increasing the number of people working on them, such as pharmacists, but no decision will be made based on the output provided by this technology alone,” the company said in a statement.
Google did not reveal when the new feature would be launched to the general public but indicated that India has the largest number of Google Lens users in the world. Noting that Google for India is the company’s annual event in South Asian countries, showcasing dozens of new developments.
The company also said it is working on one unified model to cover more than 100 Indian languages for both speech and text to empower millions of new internet users in India.
India is a key market for Google, with more than half a billion users in the country. But it has also been one of the toughest years for Google in the South Asian market, as it has been penalized twice by India’s antitrust regulator in recent months.
