Researchers are making new artificial intelligence (AI) tools. These tools can find schizophrenia by listening to how people speak. Schizophrenia is a serious mental health disorder. It changes how people think and feel. In the United States, more than three million people live with this disorder. Currently, people often wait one and a half years after their first symptoms to get a diagnosis. This delay makes it hard to start treatment early.
To help, a research team in the Netherlands made a special AI program. This program does not look at the meaning of words. Instead, it listens to the sound of the voice. The researchers measured 88 different features of speech. These features include how loud a person speaks and the length of pauses between words. They also look at how people say vowels. This Dutch AI program was 86.2 percent accurate in finding patients with schizophrenia.
The AI found that patients often have broken speech. They often say groups of syllables with long pauses in between. Another researcher, Sunny Tang at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, uses a different method. Tang looks at the words themselves. This model gives every word a mathematical address. It looks at how words and sentences are used. One method looks at the sound, and the other looks at the words. Together, these AI tools can help doctors find the disorder faster and more accurately. This can help millions of people get help sooner.