Highlights
- Microsoft has unveiled their new AI voice assistant, designed specifically to provide assistance in the healthcare industry.
- The primary goal of the AI is to reduce administrative burdens, streamline any clinical workflow, and enhance patient care by providing advanced dictation and listening capabilities.
- This new AI healthcare tool will be offered as part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
Microsoft has introduced a new voice-activated Artificial Intelligence assistant designed specifically to help healthcare professionals perform various tasks. This assistant, called Microsoft Dragon Copilot, harnesses the natural language voice dictation and ambient listening technology developed by an AI company called Nuance, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2021 for $16 Billion.
The tasks may be inclusive of, but not limited to, transcribing clinical notes, drafting paperwork, and quickly searching for required information from various medical sources. These features and capabilities have been fine-tuned further with the help of generative AI and have now been adapted to incorporate healthcare safeguards, according to a blog published by Microsoft on the 3rd of March 2025.
Microsoft Dragon Copilot: An Introduction
Microsoft Dragon Copilot is built on top of existing tools, such as Dragon Medical One (DMO) and Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX), rolled out by speech recognition company Nuance Communications. According to Microsoft, the underlying architecture of the assistant enables organizations to deliver enhanced experiences and outcomes across care settings for providers and patients alike. Built on a secure and modern architecture, it integrates almost seamlessly with the Electronic Health Records (EHRs).
Microsoft claims that DMO’s speech capabilities have already helped clinicians to transcribe “billions of patient records,” while DAX’s ambient AI technology has assisted over 3 million ambient patient conversations across 600 healthcare organizations in the month of February 2025 alone.
“No one becomes a clinician to do paperwork, but it’s becoming a bigger and bigger administrative burden, taking time and attention away from actually treating and supporting patients. That’s why we’re introducing Microsoft Dragon Copilot, the industry’s first AI assistant for clinical workflow,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, in a recent post on X(formerly Twitter).
How to use Dragon Copilot?
The AI assistant can be used for various tasks, such as drafting memos and notes in a style and format personalized by the professional. Besides its voice-to-text transcription capabilities, its UI also allows users to submit prompts or use a template to create AI-generated notes. Documentation aside, it also allows the user to search for general-purpose medical information from various trusted sources. The assistant can automate key tasks such as conversational orders, notes and clinical evidence summaries, referral letters, and after-visit summaries in one centralised workspace.
Microsoft Dragon Copilot will reportedly be accessible through a mobile application, browser, or desktop and will be integrated directly with several different electronic health records. The first to receive the assistant will be the US and Canada in May of 2025, followed soon by the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and other key markets. The cost details of the assistant, however, have not been revealed by the company.
The risk of using AI
Even though the use of AI has been optimized and streamlined and is almost near perfection, it is not without its cons. The Associated Press found that Whisper, by OpenAI, a tool for transcribing doctors’ consultations with patients, was somewhat prone to hallucinations. Whisper made up chunks of text that included racial commentary and violent rhetoric and, at the same time,e would imagine medical treatments.
With DMO and DAX providing such wonderful results in the past, the Dragon Copilot can be trusted as a capable AI assistant, not to mention its ties to cooperate mega-giant, Microsoft. As claimed by CEO Satya Nadella, it will help professionals provide a better medical experience while not being bogged down by any administrative burdens.
