COVID-19 Voice Detector – Test for COVID-19 by analyzing your voice

Carnegie Mellon University researchers said that they created an app that can determine if you have COVID-19 simply by analyzing your voice.

The team of CMU researchers in Pittsburgh says the app is still in its early stages and has not been approved by the FDA or CDC.

“I’ve seen a lot of competition for the cheapest, fastest diagnosis you can have,” Benjamin Striner, a Carnegie Mellon graduate student who worked on the project, said in an interview with Futurism. “And there are some pretty good ones that are actually very cheap and quite accurate, but nothing will ever be as cheap and as easy as talking into a phone.”

You can now use the COVID voice detector to analyze your voice for signs of infection, but researchers should not use it alone as a substitute for a medical test or study.

Carnegie Mellon professor Bhiksha Raj, who also worked on the project, told Futurism: ‘We are there to let people know how it is currently performing, but the main goal of our effort / website right now is to collect large numbers from voice recordings we could use to refine the algorithm to something we – and the medical community – trust. ”

The team believes that the app can be a valuable tool for tracking the spread of the virus, especially as they collect more data.

“If the app is to be released as a public service, this and our results must be verified by medical professionals and confirmed by an agency like the CDC,” added Raj. “Until then, it is still an experimental and unreliable system.”

Researchers conclude that the app is unlikely to ever be as accurate as a lab test.

The app works like this: if you have a smartphone or a computer with a microphone, users are asked multiple times to cough and record some vowels, as well as recite the alphabet. Then it gives a score, expressed as a download style progress bar, indicating how likely the algorithm thinks the user has COVID-19.

Click HERE to use the COVID Voice Detector app.