Doctolib takes over AI-supported telephone assistant Aaron.ai

Doctolib buys AI company so that its AI telephone assistant can also answer calls from Doctolib customers – for better accessibility of doctors' surgeries.

(Image: Lenar Nigmatullin/Shutterstock.com)

May 22, 2024 at 9:17 pm CEST

2 min. read

iX Magazin

By

Marie-Claire Koch

This article was originally published in German and has been automatically translated.

Doctolib, the company known for its appointment booking portal, is taking over Aaron GmbH, whose AI telephone assistant "Aaron.ai" will also answer calls from Doctolib customers in future and thus improve the availability of practices by telephone. Around 3500 doctors currently use the "digital assistant for the practice telephone". The aim is for fewer patients to spend time waiting in a queue, which often causes annoyance.

"The digital telephone assistant Aaron also gives older or less digitally savvy people easy access to healthcare," writes Doctolib in a press release. Full integration into Doctolib's products is planned for 2025. Doctolib customers, i.e. doctors, will then be able to decide whether to select or deselect the AI assistant on a modular basis, Doctolib explains to heise online.

According to Doctolib, there will initially be no changes for Aaron customers. "The acquisition process will have no immediate impact on current services, pricing or support" for Aaron customers. It is not clear how much Doctolib paid for the takeover. In 2015, Dealroom estimated the value of the start-up at between 15 and 25 million US dollars.

Training with fictitious data sets

According to Doctolib, the start-up's AI was trained using a specially created fictitious data set. The callers' behavior was determined through voluntary surveys in which patients and medical practices took part. Based on the results, Aaron simulated call sequences and created fictitious training data in this way. According to Doctolib, the callers' data is "processed in the cloud in European data centers as part of contract data processing".

Doctolib was recently awarded a contract for the Charité patient portal. The company has often been criticized in the past, for example when Doctolib passed on data to Facebook in 2021. However, Doctolib is trying to shed this reputation.