How China's biggest search engine aims to fix a huge crisis in health care: A bot

For Melody's artificial intelligence, Baidu drew on data from a number of public and private sources, including medical textbooks, medical websites — which have gathered a vast array of back and forth conversations between doctors and patients and search queries — as well as search queries and information supplied by doctors. It then applied deep learning to all that health data in order to make sense of it. "That's at the heart of Melody," said Ng. For example, a person may say something like "my son is feeling under the weather" instead of "my son has the flu." Melody would know to ask follow up questions about symptoms to figure out what type of illness the patient may be suffering. To decipher the complexities of natural language, Baidu's computers have consumed huge volumes of text and applied artificial intelligence.