Can an AI Scribe Understand a Hindi or Telugu Consultation?

How Indian consultations actually sound

Very few consultations in India are in one language. A doctor asks in Hindi, the patient answers in Hindi with English medical words, and almost everyone says numbers in English: "sugar one forty", "HbA1c seven point eight", "Telma forty". In Hyderabad the same happens in Telugu, in Chennai in Tamil, in the Old City in Urdu.

A speech model trained on clean single-language audio struggles with exactly this. And the parts it struggles with - numbers, doses, drug brands - are the parts of a note that matter most.

Why numbers are the hard part

Indian-language speech models write an English word in the script of the sentence around it: "सेवन पॉइंट एट", "వన్ ఫార్టీ". A note model reading that may guess wrong: 7 instead of 7.8, or 1,40 instead of 140. Clinic Scribe reads English number words in every Indian script and in the Indian-English way doctors say them:

• "one twenty by eighty" becomes 120/80, and "one forty" becomes 140
• "two fifty mg" becomes 250, "seven point eight" becomes 7.8
• "twenty-first March" becomes the 21st, "five thirty baje" becomes 5:30
• "D three sixty K" is vitamin D3 60K, never 360

Where the meaning is ambiguous - "for twenty days" is not 420, "fifty to sixty" is not 52 - it adds nothing rather than guess.

When part of a number is not heard

Sometimes the recording loses the end of a number: "HbA1c seven point..." and then nothing. A careless note writes "HbA1c 7". The scribe notices the unfinished decimal and stops the doctor before signing, with the line it came from, so the real value is checked.

Indian drug brands

A scribe that knows "metformin" but not Glycomet, or "pantoprazole" but not Pan 40, will mishear half a prescription. Clinic Scribe knows Indian brands across ten specialties - Telma, Thyronorm, Dolo 650, Nexito, Foracort, Urimax, Gonal-F and hundreds more - flags a name it may have misheard, and blocks signing when a dose is outside the usual range, like "Telma 400" where 40 was meant.

Measure it on your own patients

No vendor's language claim is worth as much as your own consultations. In a Clinic Scribe pilot the accuracy for your languages is measured on your own patients before you rely on it, and you read and sign every note either way.