UK National Health Service and Amazon collaborate

The UK National Health Service (NHS) announced the beginning of a collaboration with Amazon through Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa. According to the announcement, Alexa will assist patients, especially those who cannot access the Internet, to receive medical information from the NHS website by using basic voice commands. Alexa will use information from the NHS website to provide answers to questions such as: ‘Alexa, how do I treat a headache?’, ‘Alexa, what are the symptoms of the flu?’. The goal is to reduce pressure on the NHS in providing basic health information, and is part of the plans to make NHS digitally available.