SymptomAI: Towards a conversational AI agent for everyday symptom assessment
Google Research introduces SymptomAI, a conversational AI agent based on Gemini Flash 2.0 for symptom assessment. In a randomized national study with 13,917 participants, five prompting strategies (dynamic, fixed canonical, flexible canonical, and unguided baseline) were compared against clinician assessments. Key findings: clinicians preferred SymptomAI's differential diagnosis (DDx) over peer clinicians' in >50% of cases; all agent-driven strategies significantly outperformed the unguided baseline in top-5 accuracy; AI's relative advantage was greatest for low-confidence clinician cases. SymptomAI diagnoses correlated with Fitbit biosignals (heart rate, skin temperature, sleep) around symptom onset, especially for respiratory infections. The work demonstrates AI's potential for real-world symptom assessment but stresses that all outputs are research-only.