Soon, Google will help you read the bad handwriting on your doctor's prescription

Google (Image Courtesy: AP)

At the recently held Google for India event, the search and hardware giant showed a research prototype of a feature that can help you decipher your doctor's prescriptions.

“We’ve started working on the complex process of identifying what’s written on medical prescriptions by building an assistive model to digitize it, using AI, for medical healthcare professionals," the company said in a statement.

While it isn't ready for public release yet, the feature will allow you to take a photo of the prescription and then let Google process it. When its completed, Google will tell you the medicines mentioned on the prescription and the dosage.

This is really helpful for patients because a lot of medical professionals have bad handwriting, which sometimes makes it difficult to understand what is written on the prescription.

Google says that it seeks to "augment the humans in the loop such as pharmacists" and not replace them. The company wants the technology to be seen as "assistive" and says that no final decisions will be taken on the results provided by the feature.

At the event, Google announced that it was building an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model, that will make voice and text search available in over 100 Indian languages.