SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Nov. 19, 2024 – Today PicnicHealth unveiled an AI assistant that empowers patients to take control of their healthcare. Picnic simplifies medical records and provides actionable insights, enabling patients to make informed decisions. By integrating health data from any U.S. care site, Picnic breaks down data silos and makes it easier to navigate a complex healthcare system.

“We’re simplifying healthcare with a true universal patient record,” said Troy Astorino, PicnicHealth’s co-founder and CTO. “With Picnic, we’re putting our world-leading medical AI directly in the hands of patients to track down and make sense of their medical data. This gives them a new level of understanding of their health history and enables them to navigate their care with confidence.”

Many patients, especially those with chronic conditions, have complex health histories with disparate data across the healthcare system. Medical records from physician visits, hospital stays, test results, and prescriptions are scattered across patient portals, making it difficult to track care and leaving patients unsure about next steps in managing their health.

Patients who sign up for Picnic receive a complete timeline of their medical records as well as a unified care plan based on physician notes and advice. Picnic also enables patients to ask specific questions about their health so that they can stay proactive. Picnic also provides:

• AI search – patients can ask questions about their health history and get GenAI-powered answers along with related data sources such as lab results, procedures, and physician notes. Picnic scans all medical records to find relevant health information quickly and easily.
• Smart pinboards – patients can track specific health conditions like diabetes or cancer with a personalized, curated view of relevant medical data. Picnic analyzes health records and organizes related visits, test results, and medications in easy-to-find pinboards
• Smart highlights – patients can instantly understand complex medical terms as they review their medical records. Patients can highlight unfamiliar words and receive an easy-to-understand explanation from Picnic using their health history as context.

Today’s news follows the recent launch of the PicnicHealth Virtual Clinic, which provides patients access to clinician support to navigate and stay proactive in managing their health. Picnic can act as a concierge to the Virtual Clinic, answering health questions and guiding patients to personalized care from clinic providers.

The AI health assistant is currently available to early adopters. General availability is expected by the end of the year. PicnicHealth continues to invest in their AI assistant and has plans to add future capabilities to further help patients manage complex healthcare needs and participate in observational research. To learn more about how Picnic helps patients take control of their health, visit https://picnichealth.com/care.

About PicnicHealth

PicnicHealth is a leading health technology company dedicated to simplifying healthcare for everyone. To date, the company’s direct-to-patient approach and innovative AI and technology platform have enabled 12 of the top 20 largest life science companies to run more efficient observational research. PicnicHealth has given tens of thousands of patients access to tools and virtual care services to simplify their care journey. PicnicHealth was recently named one of the World’s Best Digital Health Companies by Newsweek and the “Best MedTech Startup” by MedTech Breakthrough. The future is here with PicnicHealth. Learn more at picnichealth.com.

Featured image credit: PicnicHealth

Adobe is making waves in the AI arena with its recent announcement of integrating Adobe AI Assistant, a generative AI tool embedded within Adobe Reader and Acrobat applications. This innovative feature empowers users to converse with their PDFs, unlocking information with unprecedented ease and efficiency. Let’s delve into the exciting capabilities of this groundbreaking technology.

Adobe AI Assistant integration on Adobe Reader

Say goodbye to the struggle of sifting through lengthy PDFs. Adobe AI Assistant acts as your personal document concierge, allowing you to chat directly with your content. Ask questions, receive answers, and glean key insights through a natural conversational interface. Whether you’re looking for specific details, seeking a comprehensive summary, or simply exploring the document’s main points, AI Assistant serves as your intelligent guide.

According to the announcement, the integration of AI will allow users to interact with their documents through conversation:

“Deeply integrated into Reader and Acrobat workflows, AI Assistant instantly generates summaries and insights from long documents, answers questions and formats information for sharing in emails, reports and presentations.”

-Adobe

No more wasting time scrolling through endless pages. AI Assistant automatically generates clickable links within your PDF, leading you directly to the information you seek. This intuitive feature streamlines navigation, saving you precious time and frustration.

Adobe brings the next-gen AI video magic with Rephrase.ai

Worried about the accuracy of AI-generated content? Adobe AI Assistant prioritizes trust and transparency. Each answer and insight is accompanied by intelligent citations, allowing you to verify the source and validate the information presented. Additionally, AI Assistant intelligently formats key points and summaries into various forms, including outlines, emails, presentations, and reports, catering to your specific needs.

While initially focused on PDFs, Adobe’s vision extends beyond these document formats. AI Assistant is designed to eventually encompass a wider range of file types, including Word, PowerPoint, and beyond, offering its transformative capabilities to an even broader audience.

A glimpse into the future

Adobe’s commitment to AI innovation doesn’t stop here. They are already exploring cutting-edge features like AI-powered authoring and editing, potentially revolutionizing the content creation process. Additionally, Adobe hints at integrating key aspects of Firefly, their creative generative model, further expanding the AI Assistant’s functionality.

Currently, Adobe AI Assistant is in its beta phase, offering a sneak peek into its immense potential. It’s readily available for Acrobat Individual, Pro, and Teams users, along with trial accounts, requiring no activation.

While the beta version provides a comprehensive set of features, Adobe plans to offer the full spectrum of AI Assistant’s capabilities through an add-on subscription plan upon its official release.

“Reader and Acrobat customers will have access to the full range of AI Assistant capabilities through a new add-on subscription plan when AI Assistant is out of beta. Until then, the new AI Assistant features are available in beta for Acrobat Standard and Pro Individual and Teams subscription plans on desktop and web in English, with features coming to Reader desktop customers in English over the next few weeks – all at no additional cost. Other languages to follow. A private beta is available for enterprise customers.”

-Adobe

Working with PDFs can sometimes be a cumbersome task, requiring intricate editing and formatting. However, the introduction of Adobe AI Assistant as a new tool brings a wave of relief to users. This innovative solution promises to streamline workflows by offering intelligent assistance tailored to PDF manipulation.

Featured image credit: Adobe

Chatbots help customers to resolve their issues at a blazing speed but the one of the main questions is whether the business should opt for a rule-based bot or an AI- based bot.

Chatbots are not new in the technological arena. They are a lot smarter now than their predecessors. The primary reason is being a new age Artificial Intelligence augmentation as well as other technical advancements by the AI development companies. Let’s think about the bots that are appreciably smart and answer logically. They are often confused with smart assistants like Google assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple’s Siri. We know that at present chatbots cannot solve complex situations without human intervention. There will soon be a day when we won’t be able to tell the difference between human conversation and a chatbot.

According to HubSpot, about 71% of people use Chatbots for a faster solution of problems. People don’t like human interactions. Due to this reason, about 53% of people prefer a business with texting service enabled. Also, 56% of users prefer texting over call customer care.

Role of Chatbots in modern society

Chatbots were introduced to reinvent the way business houses interact with their customers and solve problems. How can anyone forget the days when BPOs were overloaded with customer calls. Most calls, e-mails, and texts were trivial in nature! The result was that the executives failed to attend all the customers. As a result, the brand value depreciated at an alarming rate. It was realized that most customers ask repetitive questions. Thereby consuming valuable time of the executive who could have solved a genuine issue of a customer. That was when machine learning consulting companies came up with the idea of automating the entire customer care process using chatbots. The chatbots now help the customers to resolve their issues at blazing speeds. It also gives the company the independence to focus on issues that require more attention.

Sir Alan Turing developed the Turing Test in 1950 to check the intelligence of the machine using the Turing test. It is a test to exhibit intelligent behavior that imitates its human counterpart in a differentiable way. According to this test, a human evaluator judges natural language processing between a human user and the machine and the extent to which it responds like humans.

The global chatbot market is expected to hit the billion-dollar mark before 2025. It implies a steady growth of 24.3%.

We don’t know about the intelligence of chatbots and how far they have come since their inception. Is there a way to make them more intelligent? Yes, there is a way.

Chatbots Categories: –

• Rule-based chatbots
• AI chatbots

Out of the two, AI chatbots have recently gained a lot of recognition in recent years. They are popular in FMCG business houses and logistics business. However, it is a tough decision on which one to go for while setting up a business. Let’s dig deeper into this.

Rule-based chatbots

This is the primitive type of chatbot and is very specific regarding its versatility. It answers questions and takes the necessary steps as per the codes punched into it. While working with them, one needs to keep in mind that the questions asked must be direct and simple. Only then the desired answer can be expected. Moreover, the answers are much general when compared to those from AI chatbots. A bot development company can build rule-based chatbots either with simple codes or complicated ones. It depends on the requirements stated by the company. But the bot won’t do anything outside its code protocol. So, it might be difficult for a customer to find a solution for a new issue that has not been programmed. They are developed on Artificial Intelligence Markup Language. This type of bot has a high probability of failing the Turing test if it strictly abides by a particular model.

There are certain advantages of rule-based chatbots too like they incorporate direct-action buttons for many regular tasks such as sending an email, uploading an attachment etc.

AI chatbots

AI chatbots in comparison with rule-based chatbots provide human-imitated reaction to the issues asked. They give specific answers to each issue by learning natural language response and regular updates in a machine learning engine. It gets better with more usage. An AI chatbot’s basic advantage is the ability to be available all the time which accounts for 64% of its functionality. The next 55% of advantage accounts for instant responses. While the rest 55% is because of answering easy questions.

Since the Artificial Intelligence companies in India are using machine learning to improve the functionality of chatbots and are making them more intelligent.

Chatbots can be modeled on two principles:

Retrieval based models: They are trained specifically on some questions and their possible answers. It is like a database of questions, and their answers are provided to the chatbot. When a question is asked, the bot searches the most relevant answer from the lot and displays the one that is selected. It is different from other AI bots as it cannot generate a new answer to the question. But since they rely on machine learning, if the database has been arranged accurately, they can solve the queries commendably. It is up to the decision of developers and AI consulting services to set the rules of the query with ranging difficulty. The difficulty level is set using machine learning algorithms, and a suitable answer is selected. The advantage of this type of chatbot is that there is no issue regarding language and grammar as the answers are pre-set and don’t clash with the syntax priority.      

Generative models: They are better than rule-based chatbots since they can generate a new answer and the replies are different from the previous one. The reason for their better performance is that they take words from the query and generate the answer accordingly. They have a shortcoming due to this property that they are more prone to errors than retrieval-based models as they require a spelling and grammar check before displaying the answer. For removing this issue, they need to be developed with better codes and guidance of expert machine learning companies in India. After full training, they can give the rule-based models a run for their money.

Proper planning and execution are necessary for the success of a chatbot. A report states that 43% of people prefer interacting with human first. Among them, 30% are concerned with chatbot mistakes.  If these issues are not taken care of, the acceptability of chatbots will be hindered.

For a business to decide on which type of chatbot to be used for its processing, the Turing test results must be taken as a decisive result. The rule-based bots can be preferred for a business that deals with straight questions that don’t require much intelligence and customized answers. Business dealing with delivery, tracking, and logistics offer the best application for rule-based chatbots while AI chatbots are ideal for customer issues, where pre-set answers cannot serve the purpose of satisfying the customer.