Source: The Next Web
A stroke survivor couldn't book an appointment through an AI receptionist system because it failed to recognize her speech pattern. The gap exposes how companies deploy automation without accounting for dysarthria, accents, hearing aids, and other common conditions that affect millions of people. Healthcare practices adopt these systems for cost savings without building in human fallbacks or testing across actual patient populations. Accessibility isn't absent from the product roadmap by accident—it's a design choice that treats standard speech as the only legitimate customer.