In partnership with LUMS and with support from the Gates Foundation, our Office of AI Delivery Unit is piloting Awaaz-e-Sehat, an AI-powered maternal health voice assistant designed to help women access maternal health information and guidance through conversations in their own languages and local dialects. The ambition goes well beyond translating medical advice into Urdu or Punjabi. A woman in a rural community may describe her symptoms using expressions, colloquialisms or traditional terms that are very different from formal medical terminology. The same symptom may be described differently across districts, dialects and communities.

For AI to be genuinely useful, it must understand not just what a woman is saying, but what she actually means. That is precisely what we are seeking to test through Awaaz-e-Sehat: whether AI can understand local speech patterns, interpret the medical meaning behind everyday expressions, and provide reliable, context-sensitive maternal health guidance, while recognising when professional medical attention is necessary.

This is particularly important for women who may have limited literacy, limited access to doctors or........

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