Voice is the universal interface

Peter Phua

19 Sep 2025 — 1 min read

I started working in Health Tech in the early aughts, with a small tech business I started with a friend from school (AudioNotch).

At the time, the thinking was that app-based tools dedicated to specific disease states were the preferred thing to build - and you saw a lot of successful companies use this model (approaches like Omada Health come to mind).

The problem with requiring users to use a dedicated web app or smartphone app is cognitive load.

Patients are busy, overwhelmed, and lack time to learn a new GUI interface for each specific medical issue they're dealing with. The cognitive load from remembering to take 10+ medications a day is already enormous (many patients fall into this category).

Asking this type of person to use some dedicated app?

You're asking someone who's already mentally tired to burn more cognitive effort. For this reason, app-based health interventions are continuously swimming upstream.

It's been said that text is the universal interface - I think this is half wrong.

I believe that voice is the universal interface, and the preferred interface for any senior-facing healthcare app, AI or otherwise.

The simplest app is no app at all.

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We have a healthcare AI diffusion problem in Canada

Large Language Models are very good at differential diagnosis

What is Agentic Healthcare?