COVID Voice Detector app by researchers uses AI to detect coronavirus in minutes

With rising Covid-19 cases in most countries every hour, what has become the most important task right now is testing more and more people for symptoms. While the traditional method takes a lot of time, is costly and difficult to access, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have developed an app that uses artificial intelligence to hear your voice and recognise if you have Covid-19.

"There is a growing shortage of medical testing facilities. Tens of thousands of potentially infected people who need to be tested do not have easy access to medical tests," reads the app's website. "Our goal is to develop a voice-based testing system for covid-19, that could potentially reach every person in the world."

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The experimental app called COVID Voice Detector, as reported by Gizmodo, is the result of researchers from the university along with engineers from voca.ai, telling.ai, and hat-ai.com and Incremental Healthcare LLC.

It is yet to reach the end users as the team is still working on it.

The app asks users to create a login, the app takes you through a number of steps that also includes you to cough three times reciting the alphabet, and holding out vowels for as long as possible in order to measure the lung capacity. The result tells you if your "voice carries signatures of covid-19." The app compares your voice with the Covid-19 patients that have been tested by the researchers. The users would have to give their demographic data as well including height, weight and if you have been tested with Covid-19 before or not.

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It is worth adding that this is just an experimental app and is not yet approved by medical authorities like CDA or FDA. Although this is not accurate, adding more data by users is likely to give improved results over time as per the researchers.