The idea is to produce cloud-based software that can understand natural language medical advice questions, and can help doctors make diagnoses. The goal of the current research is to learn more about how artificial intelligence interacts with non-scripted medical questions from the real world. And yes, the key word there is "non-scripted." Rather than programs that understand only coded language, this software would understand speech the way laypeople people talk. The research team from the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland started by accessing 9,000 medical questions from Stanford University and the University of Minnesota.