A GP surgery in South Yorkshire has withdrawn an AI receptionist after a woman recovering from a stroke could not make it understand her and moved to another practice. The NHS Accessible Information Standard has required practices to identify and meet patients’ communication needs since 2016.
A woman recovering from a stroke could not get her doctor’s AI receptionist to understand her. After several attempts to book an appointment she registered with a different practice, and the surgery has since withdrawn the system.
The details are the point. Her stroke had left her speech fragmented and affected her right side, and the automated service asked her not to use speakerphone, which she needed because she could hold the handset with only one hand.
This was not one bad call. Healthwatch Rotherham found that the system, an AI receptionist called Emma, “does not respond well to variations in speech such as regional accents or those with speech impediments.”
Other patients described giving up. “I could never get it to understand me, I ended up just hanging up and not bothering to try and book an appointment,” one told the watchdog, while others travelled to the surgery in person instead.
