Full disclosure: ALEX is smart … but only as smart as we’ve made him so far. You -or your learner- may have experienced ALEX being a bit confused, or not quite understanding a more unusual or complex question. Perhaps a slightly embarrassing moment occurred when he either just responded with a puzzled “Sure” or gave a completely wrong answer. This can happen when ALEX is faced with a question that’s not sufficiently similar to any one of the questions he knows how to answer.
With your own customized patients, you always had the ability to make any changes as you like it fit, but what about the patient scenarios used by all Alex users as the ones bundled with ALEX? By the very nature of human communications, those are not complete or perfect either. In the past, if our support team learned about such misinterpreted questions, we went through the session transcripts and added the questions to the topics and responses we believed were the best fit for them.
From now on, we have a better way. With a single click, you can tell Alex what you expected him to say when getting that particular question. Your suggestion will be immediately submitted. After passing a quick review, your submission will make all ALEX simulators in the world smarter.
ALEX can recognize hundreds of topics and has a patient-specific response for each one of those. The vast majority of questions appropriate in a medical interview situation most likely ask about one of those existing topics. In this case, all you need to do is pick an existing topic for this particular question and you are done: you just made ALEX smarter. This is now possible with the new Speech Suggestions feature.
But sometimes, you need to go further. With the new Speech Suggestions tool, you can not only pick an existing topic for a question, but you can also suggest changes for the response, a brand new topic or even a new category of topics.ALEX can recognize hundreds of topics and has a patient-specific response for each one of those. The vast majority of questions appropriate in a medical interview situation most likely ask about one of those existing topics. In this case, all you need to do is pick an existing topic for this particular question and you are done: you just made ALEX smarter. This is now possible with the new Speech Suggestions feature.
The best thing about Speech Suggestions that it is super easy to use. As you know, all questions asked ALEX are transcribed and appear in the simulation log, as well as his response, whether it is fully correct or not really. Let’s see an example:
Note the little question bubble icon right of the question the learner asked the simulator. That’s new and that’s the entry point to the new Speech Suggestions feature. This is available to you no matter what patient you are running and whether you are looking at the event log while the simulation is still running or after the fact, using the Archive. To learn more about using Speech Suggestions, please read this article we just published at our Support Portal.
We are thrilled about making all of you an even more directly connected part of the process of making Alex smarter every day. Thanks for your input – all ALEX sessions are going to benefit from it. By the way, more amazing communication enhancements are coming to your ALEX very soon – stay tuned and watch this space! 🙂