Special Report: AI voice assistants have officially arrived in healthcare

As 2017 wound down, Amazon's Alexa voice assistant rose up to the top of Apple's App Store while Amazon's Echo Dot was its own bestseller. But some of the millions of those devices sold have already found their way into hospitals like Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Northwell Health in New York, the Commonwealth Care Alliance in Boston, and Libertana Home Health in Los Angeles. "When we went from laptops to smartphones as our primary means of doing computing, that was a major paradigm shift," said John Halamka, MD, CIO at Beth Israel. "Ambient listening tools probably will replace mobile devices." Amazon is hardly alone in the market. Apple Siri, Google Home and Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana are also available. At least one hospital is already girding to implement Google Home as well.