Laerdal Medical Uses Azure AI Text to Speech to Create Immersive Training Experience

If you've ever been CPR certified, then you may have – unknowingly – already encountered Laerdal’s products. With the aim of helping save 1 million lives every year by 2030, Laerdal Medical is a world-leading healthcare provider of CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) manikins and other lifesaving technology, medical training, and resources. As part of achieving this mission, Laerdal is investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning, including Azure Text to Speech.

A legacy of innovation

Innovation is at the heart of this company. Though they now specialize in healthcare, their story began nearly eight decades ago as one of Norway’s leading manufacturers of children's toys and books. In 1954, Åsmund Lærdal's life changed when he managed to save his two-year-old son from drowning. Consequently, his ambition to teach more people the fundamentals of CPR - and thereby, save more lives. With a pioneering attitude, he pivoted Laerdal towards the healthcare industry and the company began producing CPR manikins with the same soft plastic it had previously used for making children's dolls.   

Revolutionizing medical education simulations 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Laerdal made another bold move - they began developing the next generation of their 3D virtual training simulator for healthcare students and providers. This sophisticated platform was designed to provide an immersive experience that simulates the real-life interactions between patients and providers. To create this realistic simulation, they required voices to bring it all together. 

In the beginning, Laerdal obtained these voices through hiring and recording actors. Unfortunately, this process was y time-consuming and inhibited use case expansion for the training program. The process also required nurses, doctors, and other specialists to spend time coordinating and leading the recordings with voice actors, diverting attention from other pressing matters. To overcome this bottleneck, Jesper Pærregaard, Group Product Manager, started searching for a provider that could help in generating synthetic voices.

“Imagine having to use some of your most scarce and specialized people on tedious voice actor coordination. Then imagine that you have to do this for several months every time you have a release or an update. It wasn’t a dream scenario for neither Laerdal nor our people.” - Jesper Pærregaard, Group Product Manager

Laerdal chose to collaborate with Azure AI; immediately impressed by the quality and natural sound of the text-to-speech voices.

“We tested different text-to-speech service providers, but Azure offered us the best combination of quality, cost, pre-made neural voices, ability to make our own custom voices, and an easy to use API.” - Jesper Pærregaard, Group Product Manager

Enabling agility with Microsoft Azure AI Text-to-speech

By integrating Microsoft Azure AI Text to Speech into its training programs, Laerdal reduced costs and significantly shortened the development time of the virtual training modules. Specifically, they implemented Neural Text-to-Speech (Neural TTS) which yields a truly realistic speech experience from text input. Using both standard and custom neural voices provided by Azure AI allowed Laerdal to reduce the time spent on creating voices for the virtual patients and providers from two months to less than 24 hours. 

According to Pærregaard, it is difficult to express the magnitude of the impact— never before has he "seen anything, that with the turn on of a switch, could give such a massive reduction in work effort.”

Prioritizing Inclusivity in Medical Education 

To counter the immense disparity in global healthcare, Laerdal is devoted to providing healthcare students and providers with exposure to diverse real-world patient scenarios in their training.  By using Azure AI text-to-speech, Laerdal can create more inclusive simulations. By developing voices in varying language and accents, and representing various states of health – including patients experiencing pain or out of breath moments – Laerdal can more accurately depict people from diverse backgrounds. Today, Azure AI’s Neural Text-to-Speech is currently available in 400 neural voices across 140 languages and variants.

"If it wasn’t for AI voices we would not be able to provide such a diverse line-up of voices for our virtual patients.” - Jesper Pærregaard, Group Product Manager

This future of the Laerdal and Azure AI partnership 

The partnership between Azure and AI and Laerdal is by no means at an end, it is just beginning. In the coming year, Laerdal plans to leverage Azure AI to create new virtual applications and conversational AI systems for e-learning courses, a neo-natal resuscitation program that ensures optimal care for newborns, and more. Microsoft feels privileged to continue our work with Laerdal as they strive towards their mission of helping save 1 million lives per year by 2030.

“I believe that in the future AI will be foundational for how we build our learning platforms and content. At the moment it feels like there is an almost exponential development within AI and I am super happy to see that Microsoft is leading this field so that we can leverage these advancements to achieve our mission.” - Jesper Pærregaard, Group Product Manager

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