Dr. Young was the first to try the "Voice of Emmy" service and it is now in operation in three practices. At first, Dr. Young was very apprehensive about the idea of a robotic telephone assistant.

"Like the nurses and doctors in our office, I was initially skeptical that a voice robot could even function at a level that would be usable for us and for patients. We had already had experience with an answering machine that was very time-consuming to operate, so I was not looking for a more expensive solution with a similar outcome. I was therefore surprised to find out how confidently the robot could already speak Czech - in the sense of saying the text given in advance. Understanding is also at a surprisingly good level."

The service works on the principle of natural dialogue between the calling client and the robot. The call is guided by the robot based on a pre-prepared script, and thanks to human speech processing and AI-based language analysis, the robot understands what the caller is saying and can respond appropriately. The output is then transcribed into Emma as the next incoming request.

Here is a typical output from a transcribed patient request:

"I would like to ask you to issue me an electronic sick leave because I have had symptoms of covid-19 since Friday so I went shopping on Saturday morning and the results came back positive since Friday so I have a fever in the forties and I have already arranged with my employer that I am on sick leave from today"

We put the voice robot into operation on 16 December 2021 in the first surgery. The impact in terms of telephone availability is clearly positive - the voice robot is always available during office hours and can handle a virtually unlimited number of calls in parallel. This means that the days when the practice had up to 250 unanswered calls per day are definitely over for Dr. Young.

The statistics for the practice's first full month of operation (January 2022) are as follows:

• Number of calls received: 962 (average 46 per day).
  
• Number of completed calls: 486 (51%, average 23 per day)
  
• Proportion of 'urgent' calls (which are connected to the surgery): 20%
  

This shows that of the 46 incoming calls per day, only about 5 per day end up as "urgent" calls and are transferred to staff in the surgery. In Dr. Young's office, approximately 85% of patient requests come in through Emmy (online application) and 15% through "Voice of Emmy". The practice is positive about the initial experience ("The nurses can't imagine going back to the previous situation where the phone rang all day!") and intends to continue to do so. But it will probably allow patients to call staff directly during about 20% of surgery hours, within defined blocks of time (e.g. 9am to 10am each day, and similarly in the afternoon).

Want to know more? Contact us at podpora@sestraemmy.cz!

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