New app detects Covid in your voice and is 'more accurate than lateral flow tests'

Scientists have developed an app that can detect Covid in your voice in under one minute. The scientific breakthrough claims to be more accurate than lateral flow tests, giving a correct positive result 89 per cent of the time and 83 per cent of the time for negative cases.Powered by artificial intelligence, it can delivers its answer in under a minute compared to the unwieldy LFTs where accuracy reportedly varied depending on brand.

The app could quickly screen people before mass events such as concerts and football matches. It could also revolutionise the approach to testing for Covid especially in poorer countries, where the gold-standard PCR tests are expensive and often difficult to distribute.In the UK, it could help keep the virus at bay in the long-term after the government decided to scrap free LFTs.The Dutch boffins behind the new app explained how it works.

They said that Covid usually affects the upper respiratory tract and vocal chords of a person, leading to subtle changes in their voice.The team investigated whether using this to detect the novel virus was possible.During development, they used data from the University of Cambridge’s crowdsourcing COVID-19 Sounds App.

This contained 893 audio samples from 4,352 participants, 308 of whom had tested positive for the virus.The app would take some basic info on participants including demographics, medical history and smoking status.It would then ask them to record some respiratory sounds which include coughing three times, breathing deeply, through their mouth and reading a short sentence three times.Then a voice analysis technique called Mel-spectrogram analysis was used which identifies different key features in the voice - including loudness, power and