This is the second in a three-part series reporting from Toronto's booming Artificial Intelligence sector where new technologies are being pioneered that will permanently change all of our lives Just 45 seconds in the company of scientist Frank Rudzicz and his machines is all it takes to determine whether or not you are suffering from Alzheimer's disease. In that time, the complex Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms that the 37-year-old and his team have developed are able to pick apart your voice and predict the severity of the disease to an accuracy of around 82 per cent (and rising). First, there is your actual use of language. Alzheimer's sufferers tend to leave longer pauses between words, prefer pronouns to nouns (for example, saying "she" rather than a person's name) and give more simplistic descriptions, such as a "car" rather than the model or make. Then there is what Rudzicz calls the "jittter and shimmer" of speech; variations in frequency and amplitude.

Rudzicz, who is also an assistant professor in computer science at the University of Toronto, admits there are complex regulatory issues around the extent to which AI machines should be used to diagnose patients. Currently, his models are being piloted in the largest network of retirement homes in North America, and among elderly patients in Edinburgh and Nice, to collect data and train the machines to understand different languages and accents. At present, they are only being used only to map cognitive decline within existing patients rather than actually diagnosis new ones. "We have always been careful to position this as an assessment aid rather than straight diagnosis," Rudzicz says. "One of the main risks I see with AI in healthcare is people can put a lot of faith into it and discount other sources of evidence."