AI Amplified: What Your Voice Reveals Before You Do, with Henry O'Connell, CEO and Co-Founder of Canary Speech

S2E2: What Your Voice Reveals Before You Do, with Henry O'Connell, CEO and Co-Founder of Canary Speech On this episode, host Dr. Heather Bassett welcomes Henry O'Connell, CEO and Co-Founder of Canary Speech, to make the case that the human voice carries more diagnostic information than almost any other data source we're not yet using at scale. Henry traces Canary Speech's origin back to a six-hour conversation in a Provo bagel shop with his co-founder Jeff Adams, and to a more personal starting point — noticing that his own daughter's tone and cadence told him more about her state of mind than her actual words did. That observation became the basis for a technology built to measure something clinicians and parents already sense intuitively. He walks through how Canary Speech evolved from analyzing structured, scripted speech to conversational speech, and eventually away from words altogether — down to 2,590 features of speech measured every 10 milliseconds, generating 15.5 million data points per minute, all aimed at capturing how speech is produced rather than what it says. Henry and Dr. Bassett dig into what it takes to earn trust for a diagnostic AI tool in mental health and neurology specifically, from co-developing the technology with physicians and running multi-country clinical trials, to holding to HIPAA and ISO standards and keeping current applications research-only rather than rushing to market. They also cover how Canary Speech integrates directly into existing clinical workflows through platforms like Dragon Copilot and Zoom, avoiding the adoption friction that sinks so many well-intentioned health tech tools. Throughout, Henry's vision points outward, toward wearables and other ubiquitous devices as the next step in making this kind of screening available to far more people, in far more places, than a clinical visit alone ever could. Find all of our network podcasts on your favorite podcast platforms and be sure to subscribe and like us. Learn more at www.healthcarenowradio.com/listen