AI has been at the forefront of the medical profession's efforts to fight Covid-19 and treat patients during the coronavirus pandemic. Enabling healthcare providers to make fast, accurate and data-driven decisions, the technology has been producing some extraordinary outcomes. Outside the Covid crisis, machine intelligence is lending itself to hundreds of medical applications, from scanning vast numbers of people to assess their risk of dementia to accelerating the drug discovery process. Here is just a small selection of cases where the technology is revolutionising healthcare provision. Healthcare professionals are using AI-powered speech-recognition systems to update electronic patient records more quickly and accurately.

The study tested five publicly available tools from Apple, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft that anyone can use to build speech recognition services. These tools are not necessarily what Apple uses to build Siri or Amazon uses to build Alexa. But they may share underlying technology and practices with services like Siri and Alexa. Each tool was tested last year, in late May and early June, and they may operate differently now. The study also points out that when the tools were tested, Apple's tool was set up differently from the others and required some additional engineering before it could be tested.

ALEX CASTRO has been patient. Ever since his teenage years, when he volunteered to work on speech-recognition projects during an internship at AT&T Bell Labs, Mr Castro has been waiting for the technology to work well enough to become widely adopted. "I always felt that voice recognition was a technology that would someday be applied to mainstream uses," he says. While waiting for "someday" to arrive, the 32-year-old had time to finish his college degree, earn a Masters at Cornell, do a stint at Microsoft's MSN Entertainment business and oversee the launch of Amazon's Mechanical Turk online marketplace. Now Mr Castro has finally started his own firm, called Pluggd, a podcast directory with a nifty audio search-engine that can search audio clips (and the soundtracks of video clips) for keywords, using speech-recognition technology.

A few simple tricks can make one's time with computer-based speech-to-text engines much more pleasant -- and productive, says David Weiss, MD. Weiss, a radiologist with the Carilion Clinic in Roanoke, Va., has made an avocation of optimizing his interactions with the speech recognition system that turns his words into reports. He shared his wisdom during his turn in a diverse RSNA 2011 session on practical informatics for radiologists. The goal, he said, is to keep one's eyes on the screen as much as possible while maximizing speed and accuracy. Here are a few of his suggestions.

Try to book a train ticket on Amtrak's home page and you might just swear off train travel. A recent attempt to book a journey from New York to Boston, for example, required toggling between windows, looking up obscure station codes, and waiting for slow page repaints. When the order was finally submitted, an error message came up noting that, due to technical difficulties, the request could not be processed. If only Amtrak's Web designers were as attentive as the makers of the railroad's telephone self-service system. That system, which features the digitized voice of an operator named Julie, is a primer on good customer service.