Seminar Series 2026: Teaching an AI clinical assistant to talk

Teaching an AI clinical assistant to talk

18th February 2026, 12-1PM, King George VI Building, Lecture Theatre 6

Alongside the rapid growth of artificial intelligence in recent years has come the emergence of artificial sociality – technologies that simulate social behaviour (Natale & Depounti, 2024). From chatbots to voice assistants to social robots, these systems are increasingly embedded in our daily lives. One example of where this has already proved successful in is healthcare, where Ufonia (a Digital Health startup based in Oxford) have developed Dora, an AI-powered clinical assistant. To date, Dora has conducted over 150,000 routine telephone consultations with NHS patients, freeing up hundreds of thousands of hours of clinicians’ time for other essential healthcare work. In this talk, we will report on our ongoing collaboration with Ufonia.

Using Conversation Analysis, we have been analysing telephone calls between Dora and human users, as well as clinical consultations between human clinicians and NHS patients, to identify areas where Dora’s conversational abilities can more closely approximate human conduct. Our work with Ufonia has been guided by the questions: ‘how can we design conversational agents that are easier to talk to?’ and ‘can we design conversational agents that empathise?’ We will provide examples of how our observations have fed into the further development of Dora. Finally, we use our collaboration as evidence of how researchers of language and communication can inform the design and development of such AI-powered conversational systems.

Speakers: Adam Brandt and Spencer Hazel