Vocalis Health is launching an initiative to collect “voice prints” with the goal of offering a new contact-free way for Israel’s Health Ministry to triage, screen and monitor COVID-19 patients.

“We believe that by analyzing the voice beyond what the human ear can hear, we can unveil dedicated vocal biomarkers that will enable the healthcare community to get insights on the symptoms and hopefully the onset of the COVID-19 virus,” explains the Israeli startup, created in December 2019 through a merger of Beyond Verbal Communication and Healthymize.

“We are deploying a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence method and technique to correlate the voice with the symptoms of COVID-19. This will enable an alert about early symptoms and monitoring at home by only using a smartphone.”

Vocalis aims to enroll at least 100,000 patients by December 1 to collect as much data as possible with voice information tied to COVID-19 symptoms. It is also collecting voice prints from healthy people as a control. You can “donate” your voice to the project by clicking here.

Voice analytics is an up-and-coming field. It is believed that conditions such as heart and respiratory diseases and depression cause detectable changes in voice.

Israeli company MyndYou built AI-driven voice analytics into MyEleanor, its voicebot and virtual care manager for the elderly and homebound. On each phone call with a client, MyEleanor can detect subtle changes in health from the person’s voice and trigger proactive interventions by alerting the caregiver.