Sydney: Australian computer scientists have developed a novel Artificial Intelligence-based model that can hear the effects of Covid-19 in the sound of a forced cough, even when people are asymptomatic, an advance that can pave the way for detecting the infectious disease via diagnostic mobile phone apps. During the pandemic, many crowdsourcing platforms have been designed to gather respiratory sound audios from both healthy and Covid-19 positive groups for research purposes. A team of researchers from RMIT University accessed datasets from two of these platforms -- Covid-19 Sounds App and COSWARA -- to train the algorithm using contrastive self-supervised learning, a method by which a system works independently to encode what makes two things similar or different. With further development, their algorithm could power a diagnostic mobile phone app, said lead author Hao Xue, Research Fellow in RMIT's School of Computing Technologies. "We've overcome a major hurdle in the development of a reliable, easily-accessible and contactless preliminary diagnosis tool for Covid-19," said Xue, Research Fellow in RMIT's School of Computing Technologies.