One company working on that is Denmark's Corti, which has developed AI that can listen to healthcare consultations, either over the phone or in person, and suggest follow-up questions, prompts, treatment options, as well as automating note taking. Corti says its technology processes about 150,000 patient interactions per day across hospitals, GP surgeries and healthcare institutions across Europe and the US, totalling about 100 million encounters per year. "The idea is the physician can spend more time with a patient," says Lars Maaløe, co-founder and chief technology officer at Corti. He says the technology can suggest questions based on previous conversations it has heard in other healthcare situations. "The AI has access to related conversations and then it might think, well, in 10,000 similar conversations, most questions asked X and that has not been asked," says Mr Maaløe.

We rarely think too much about noises as we're listening to them, but there's an enormous amount of complexity involved in isolating audio from places like crowded city squares and busy department stores. In the lower levels of our auditory pathways, we segregate individual sources from backgrounds, localize them in space, and detect their motion patterns -- all before we work out their context. Inspired by this neurophysiology, a team of researchers shared in a preprint paper on Arxiv.org As the researchers note, the torso, head, and pinnae (the external part of the ears) absorb and reflect sound waves as they approach the body, modifying the frequency depending on the source's location. They travel to the cochlea (the spiral cavity of the inner ear) and the organ of Corti within, which produces nerve impulses in response to sound vibrations.

What is the single greatest adaptation of the human species? Our greatest trait is pattern recognition. In fact, it's so strong that we often read patterns where none exist. Historically, our ability to recognize patterns let us deduce when danger was near in time to take action. It also let us develop languages more complicated than a series of grunts and associations.

Upon hearing the phrase artificial intelligence or AI, a sense of curiosity and interest is provoked. Depending on the purpose and ability of the AI, signs of concern can also arise. AI has the ability to replace laborious tasks and, in some way, replicate some cognitive functions of the human brain. AI is a key driver in many businesses and institutes like the healthcare industry. It aids in decision making and improving processes.

I can't think of many better uses for artificial intelligence (AI) technology than to save lives. Danish startup Corti must agree because they built, tested and deployed an AI-enabled system that helps emergency dispatchers make life-saving decisions. Currently, Corti's expertise is in identifying cardiac arrest--when the heart has fully stopped--but the company has plans to extend its life-saving assistance and diagnoses to other ailments. There are numerous out-of-hospital cardiac arrests annually--3,500 in Denmark, 30,000 in the UK and more than 350,000 in the United States. They are often deadly, responsible for 15 percent of all deaths in Western countries.

I can't think of many better uses for artificial intelligence (AI) technology than to save lives. Danish startup Corti must agree because they built, tested and deployed an AI-enabled system that helps emergency dispatchers make life-saving decisions. Currently, Corti's expertise is in identifying cardiac arrest--when the heart has fully stopped--but the company has plans to extend its life-saving assistance and diagnoses to other ailments. There are numerous out-of-hospital cardiac arrests annually--3,500 in Denmark, 30,000 in the UK and more than 350,000 in the United States. They are often deadly, responsible for 15 percent of all deaths in Western countries.

Work is underway to deploy Corti, an AI system that detects heart attacks during emergency phone calls, and it could be coming to some of the biggest cities in Europe. Following plans announced earlier this year to roll Corti out in more cities, this summer the European Emergency Number Association (EENA), whose members include cities like London, Paris, Milan, and Munich, will deliver AI-powered assistance to emergency 112 operators. In initial trials, this assistance was found to identify cardiac arrest events more quickly than human operators. Emergency call centers from Seattle to Singapore also want to make Corti part of their operations, but there's no global standard for organizations working to save lives. Some are fine with the idea of deploying the AI through the cloud, while others with privacy concerns require the AI system to operate from on-premise servers.

A woman in Copenhagen hears a loud crash in the next room and rushes in to discover her father sprawled on the floor, unresponsive. She quickly calls Denmark's health-emergency hotline, where a person answers the phone--but a computer is eavesdropping. As the operator runs through a series of questions--the patient's age, physical condition, what he was doing when he fell--the computer quickly determines the man's heart has stopped and issues an alert. "Those human dispatchers have an amazingly hard job," says Andreas Cleve Lohmann, co-founder of Corti SA, a Danish artificial intelligence software house that created the program. "This software can help them save lives."

Time to start hoping a robot takes that emergency call. When it comes to spotting signs of cardiac arrest, artificial intelligence is beating humans. New Scientist first covered Copenhagen-based artificial intelligence company Corti earlier this year. Its AI was being trialled in Denmark to listen in on emergency calls in real-time. It searches for patterns of communication, including features like tone of voice and breathing sounds.

Corti, the Copenhagen-based company, is to enter into a partnership with the European Emergency Number Association (EENA). Under the initiative four sites across Europe have been selected to pilot the technology. The project could change the way emergency medical calls are handled in the future. Currently Corti is being deployed by Copenhagen Emergency Medical Services in order to detect cardiac arrests during emergency calls. Data suggests that Corti is 20 percent more accurate at detecting Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrests than medical dispatchers.