The Chinese search engine launched "Melody" on Tuesday, a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to help doctors care for patients over text.

Baidu (BIDU, Tech30) aims to make medical consults more accessible and help patients determine whether or not they should see a doctor in person.

For instance, if you tell Melody your child is sick, it might ask whether she has a fever or is jaundiced and follow up with additional questions.

Melody integrates with the Baidu Doctor app, which already lets patients ask doctors questions, make appointments and search for health information. Melody asks the patient preliminary questions and pulls data from digitized textbooks, research papers, online forums and other healthcare sources.

The app produces a hypothesis regarding treatment options that a human doctor edits and sends to the patient. The self-learning bot will continue to sponge up information and improve conversation as time goes on.

Eoin Treacy's view

Ray Kurzweil made clear in his talk at the ExMed conference earlier this week that “life begins at a billion impressions” when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI). In other words if you want to teach a computer how to recognise an image you need to feed it a billion examples before it can make the leap to recognition. 

The way a computer learns is to run the software, take its conclusions and run it again having removed the outliers. For example, by completing this operation more than 15 times it can learn to recognise cats and dogs and differentiate between them. A problem that evolved with scaling artificial intelligence was that this method resulted in a degrading of the data because of the practice of dispensing with outliers. In his speech Ray Kurzweil mentioned that not many people know that Google engineers have now solved that problem thus removing a major inhibiting factor in the scaling of artificial intelligence. 

Healthcare data has little problem identifying a billion impressions and the artificial intelligence incorporated into mobile doctor apps can be expected to evolve rapidly as they gain experience with how people interact, not least in a high population country like China. 

Baidu has been confined to a triangular pattern for more than a year and has pulled back over the last few weeks. It will need to sustain a move above $200 to confirm a return to demand dominance beyond short-term steadying. 

Google/Alphabet has been trending higher in an orderly manner since 2013 and a sustained move below $750 would be the minimum required to begin to question medium-term uptrend consistency.