Google can now decode doctors’ bad handwriting – TechCrunch

A significant number of doctors write prescriptions for drugs in a hurry, making it almost impossible for their patients to understand what they have scribbled down. This problem has been around for decades, and many tech companies have tried to solve it with little or no success.

Now Google is trying to translate these unfathomable texts.

The search giant announced at its annual conference in India on Monday that it was working with pharmacists to determine doctors’ handwriting.

The feature, which will be rolling out to Google Lens, will allow users to take a photo of the prescription or upload one from the photo library.

After the image is processed, the app detects the drugs mentioned in the note, a Google executive showed during a demonstration.

The company did not immediately announce when it plans to release the new capability to the general public. Google said India has the highest number of Google Lens users in the world.

Google for India is the company’s annual event in the South Asian market, where it showcases dozens of new developments. The company also said it is working on a single, unified model to cover more than 100 Indian languages ​​for both speech and text to enable internet travel for the next million individuals in the South Asian market. .

India is a key market for Google, which has over half a billion users in the country. But it has also been one of Google’s toughest years in the South Asian market, where it has been slapped twice by India’s antitrust regulator in recent months.