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Speech is a window into our brains—and not just when we’re healthy. When neurological issues arise, they often manifest in the things we say and how we say them.
IBM computer scientist Guillermo Cecchi came to appreciate just how important language is in medicine as a psychiatry postdoc at Weill Cornell Medicine in the early 2000s. Despite advances in brain imaging, “it’s still [through] behavior, and fundamentally through language, that we assess mental health,” he says. “And we deal with it through therapy. . . . Language is essential for that.”
In the digital age, hardware and software are available for “natural language processing”—a type of artificial intelligence (AI) pioneered by IBM’s Watson that extracts useful content from written and spoken language. But while companies such as Google and Facebook use language processing to evaluate our social media interactions, emails, and browsing histories in ...
