New app offers Siri-like response to health questions

HealthTap, an app that taps into the brainpower of some 50,000 licensed physicians to respond to users' medical questions, announced its latest product -- a paid, voice-activated app called TalkToDocs that can answer your medical questions on the fly.

The app, which is available on Android or iOS phones for $0.99, is similar to the startup's free mobile app, but enables users to ask their questions aloud and then receive answers via text or voice recording.

To retrieve your answer, TalkToDocs uses archived answers from HealthTap's free Q&A platform and parses the questions via natural language processing to search for the most relevant answers.

The company also recently introduced an app directory featuring doctor recommendations and written reviews of apps in both the iOS and Google Play stores. The app claims to offer non-doctors a window into the sorts of apps that physicians may actually find valuable, which could be a notch above typical user reviews. Plus HealthTap curates apps into different categories, rather than just "health" and "medical" as both Apple and Android do. Rather, users can search 30 categories, including calorie counters, period trackers, vaccine reminders, and pregnancy apps.

A similar service that has been around for years is certification platform Happtique, which helps the medical community determine which of the tens of thousands of health apps available are clinically sound. But the service's focus is on just that, the medical community, not the consumer.

https://www.healthtap.com