Skip to Content
Artificial intelligence

Amazon Alexa will now be giving out health advice to UK citizens

An Amazon Echo with tablets and a temperature probe beside it
An Amazon Echo with tablets and a temperature probe beside itAssociated Press

The UK’s National Health Service hopes that its partnership with Amazon could help to reduce demand on its services.

The news: From this week, when UK users ask their Amazon smart speaker health-related questions, it will automatically search the official NHS website, which is full of medically backed health tips and advice. For example, you will be able to ask your Echo device, “What are the symptoms of flu?” Until now, it would answer these sorts of questions based on a variety of popular responses.

The aim: The government believes it will ease the burden on over-stretched doctors and hospitals, but also help elderly, disabled, or blind patients who may struggle to access this information otherwise, according to the UK health secretary Matt Hancock. The UK already has a deal with Babylon, an AI app that provides basic answers to queries about symptoms.

The worries: There are concerns that the voice service might discourage genuinely ill people from seeking proper medical help. The service will only provide answers to questions rather than the sort of back-and-forth conversation you would have with a doctor.

The professional body for family doctors, the Royal College of GPs, called for independent research to be carried out to ensure that the advice given is safe. It being Amazon, there are also concerns over data privacy, especially in an area as sensitive as health. However, the company insists that all data is encrypted and confidential, and can be deleted by customers.

Sign up here to our daily newsletter The Download to get your dose of the latest must-read news from the world of emerging tech.

Deep Dive

Artificial intelligence

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

AI is dreaming up drugs that no one has ever seen. Now we’ve got to see if they work.

AI automation throughout the drug development pipeline is opening up the possibility of faster, cheaper pharmaceuticals.

GPT-4 is bigger and better than ChatGPT—but OpenAI won’t say why

We got a first look at the much-anticipated big new language model from OpenAI. But this time how it works is even more deeply under wraps.

The original startup behind Stable Diffusion has launched a generative AI for video

Runway’s new model, called Gen-1, can change the visual style of existing videos and movies.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.