Voice Assistants with Kenneth Sakal from Vohesu

VFH Episode #10

In this episode, Teri welcomes Kenneth Sakal, founder and CEO of Vohesu. Two years ago, Ken’s daughter asked for an Alexa device for Christmas and Ken’s fascination with voice first technology was born. As well, Ken is a 20-year cancer survivor and he believes that certain patients can really benefit from a virtual health assistant living in the home who is available to answer health-related questions on a daily basis.

Vohesu is a voice first digital transformation company focused on bringing voice back into our daily interaction with technology. Through the development of Voice First healthcare applications on Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Apple HomePod, Vohesu helps healthcare providers deliver virtual assistants to help patients get information on their chronic diseases.

Key points from Ken Sakal and Vohesu

Vohesu has created a Virtual Health Assistant
- a white-labelled health application that can provide key health information to patients on demand.
- helps patients with chronic diseases – gives information about diagnosis, drugs, side effects, and more.
- the health care industry needs 3rd party providers that can be trusted to give evidence-based information, and voice is an effective platform to do that.
- currently the virtual health assistant skill is available for Rheumatoid Arthritis; the early version of the skill is currently available on Alexa, with plans to bring the application to Google Home, and other platforms.
- Vohesu plans to expand into other autoimmune diseases.
- HIPAA is not an issue for this skill as there is currently no exchange of personal health information.
There are plans to do research with a local university to research the types of questions that patients are asking.
The heath care industry is ripe for change and this happens to be coinciding with the rise of voice technology.