Scientists from the Netherlands have revealed plans for a new Covid-19 app that can detect if a person has the virus through their voice.

Researchers have been testing the mobile phone app, which they say could detect the virus with “potentially high precision” using artificial intelligence.

An AI model was said to be 89% accurate, whilst negative cases are right 83% of the time. The tech is also cheap, meaning it could be adopted in low-income countries where PCR tests are more expensive.

Results can be provided in less than a minute and are said to be a “significant improvement” on the accuracy of lateral flow tests, scientists said.

“These promising results suggest that simple voice recordings and fine-tuned AI algorithms can potentially achieve high precision in determining which patients have Covid-19 infection,” said Wafaa Aljbawi, a researcher at the Institute of Data Science at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

“Such tests can be provided at no cost and are simple to interpret. Moreover, they enable remote, virtual testing and have a turnaround time of less than a minute.

“They could be used, for example, at the entry points for large gatherings, enabling rapid screening of the population,” Aljbawi added.

A voice analysis technique – called Mel-spectrogram – identified different voice features to “decompose the many properties of the participants’ voices”.

As part of the test, users must provide information about themselves, including medical history, smoking status and demographics and record some respiratory sounds, such as coughing and reading a short sentence.

Aljbawi added: “These results show a significant improvement in the accuracy of diagnosing Covid-19 compared to state-of-the-art tests such as the lateral flow test.

“The lateral flow test has a sensitivity of only 56%, but a higher specificity rate of 99.5%. This is important as it signifies that the lateral flow test is misclassifying infected people as Covid-19 negative more often than our test.

“In other words, with the AI LSTM model, we could miss 11 out of 100 cases who would go on to spread the infection, while the lateral flow test would miss 44 out of 100 cases.”

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AI technology has already proven to be an accurate method of testing for the virus. Earlier this year, researchers in Australia created an app to diagnose Covid-19 by asking users to cough into their phone five times.

The Brisbane-based creators of the app said a preliminary clinical trial found that the app accurately identified more than 90% of Covid infections.

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic in July, researchers in the UK revealed a test using AI that could identify Covid-19 infection within one hour.

University of Oxford scientists developed the Curial AI technology, says it can rapidly screen people arriving at hospitals for the virus and accurately predict whether they are infected.

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