Medical AIs with human faces are on their way

ASKED ABOUT the future of artificially intelligent avatars in medicine, Nova is optimistic, as well she might be. As a “brand ambassador” for Soul Machines, based in Auckland, the hub of New Zealand’s visual-effects industry, it is her job to play up the “personalised and interactive” experiences such avatars will provide as they help with virtual consultations and assist with post-operative rehabilitation. As she explains this to your correspondent online she looks me in the eye and responds to what I say with approving nods and smiles. Told I have been off colour since my last meal, she says “Oh no!” with a concerned frown before suggesting ginger tea or some over-the-counter medication. The wide blue ribbon she wears over her right shoulder, she tells me, is a “symbol of my existence as a digital person and my connection to Soul Machines, the company that created me”.

Greg Cross, Nova’s boss at Soul Machines, says Nova’s ability to respond appropriately comes from ten years of research into cognitive modelling that seeks to capture functions such as learning and emotional response. Her face conveys those responses by means of software descended from that used for computer-generated characters in movies. What she says comes in part from a version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a system powered by a large language model, or LLM. Mr Cross thinks such avatars are going to be an increasingly important way for companies to communicate with people—and that they are going to prove irresistibly useful for health systems, where the need for something like the human touch increasingly outstrips the number of trained humans available to do the professionally appropriate touching.