From our correspondent in Swindon:
Worried about a lump? Got a nasty cough that won’t budge? Many people Google queries about such symptoms daily – but now they can get NHS advice instantly by asking Amazon’s Alexa.
The voice-activated assistant is now automatically searching NHS web pagesto find answers to medical questions.
And the government hopes it will reduce the demand on human doctors.
“The sensitive data holdings of a national healthcare provider like the NHS are a form of ‘critical social infrastructure’,” said Berlin-based tech expert Mathana Stender.
“Yet they’ve been handed to a foreign company that’s both a defence contractor and targeted advertiser,”
Whether this makes much difference in terms of reducing people going to their GP, we will see, but the great thing about this project is that the whole thing has zero dependency on the NHS bureaucracy, other than the website questions (and how often is that going to change)? Amazon are running everything else, and because they’re doing it for free, there’s no involvement in the procurement bureaucracy, either.
Amazon are probably running the whole thing with less than a handful of people. If you don’t have the Stalinism and you have motivated, skilled people, that’s how small IT is. Amazon can probably chalk it up to a bit of R&D and maybe some good PR.
This morning I said “Alexa, tell me a joke.” The response was “The NHS is the best healthcare service in the world.”
World Class.
All Alexa does is scrape publically accessible Internet content. All Amazon have done it some tweeking to direct queries that sound health-related towards specifically health-related Internet content.
It’s the standard trope, if you don’t want information to be publically available, don’t make it publically available.
“Where did you get this information???!!!”
From the book you published a few years ago.
“How dare you read information I put in the public arena!!froth!!!”
NHS? They would be better getting advice from the Speaking Clock.