Voice calls combed for signs of disease

摘要

Did your voice give it away? US start-up Canary Speech is developing deep-learning algorithms to detect if people have neurological conditions like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease just by listening to their voice. And it has found a controversial source of data to train them on: phone calls to a health insurer. The insurer - which Canary Speech wouldn't name but says is "a very large American healthcare and insurance provider" - has provided hundreds of millions of phone calls that have been collected over 15 years and are labelled with information about each speaker's medical history and demographic background.