Talkatoo, the Halifax-based maker of specialty transcription software for veterinarians, has launched a new verification service that adds a layer of human scrutiny for better accuracy.

The company’s main product allows veterinarians to dictate their case notes into their phones, rather than writing them by hand, with the artificial intelligence system being specifically trained to contend with esoteric medical jargon. Verified by Talkatoo, as the company calls its new service, adds the option for users to pay a three-figure subscription price to have a human transcriptionist with knowledge of medical terminology double check the AI’s work.

Chief Executive Shawn Wilkie said in an interview that the high-stakes nature of medical records, even for pets, means many of Talkatoo’s customers view the manual verification as being well worth the expense. The human transcriptionists will also format a veterinarian’s notes and add them to the office’s “practice management system” record-keeping software.

“Our clients care a lot about accuracy,” said Wilkie of the Verified service’s value proposition. “They take pride in keeping their records as thorough and well-organized as possible.”

Founded in 2019 by Wilkie and accountant Aly Mawji, who was previously chief financial officer of Antigonish, Nova Scotia-based IT services company Robotnik Solutions, Talkatoo’s veterinary transcription business was meant to be the beachhead market for a play that would ultimately lead to the human healthcare market. But Wilkie said demand from the veterinary world has proven so robust the team has instead decided to continue focusing its efforts there, with sales growing every month since the product's initial launch almost four years ago.

“If a veterinarian sees 30 patients, that could mean hours of paperwork at the end of the day,” said Wilkie. “Talkatoo frees them up to spend more time with their families or reinvest in growing their business by seeing more patients.

“We’ve had veterinarians tell us they’ve used it for each of those purposes.”

The launch of Verified by Talkatoo also creates new product development opportunities. Manually double-checking the AI’s work will allow the human transcriptionists to flag places where the system made an error, letting the model learn from its mistakes and refine itself over time.

Wilkie said another benefit of the new verification service is that it addresses an inefficiency in the veterinary labour market: large numbers of people with relevant skills have left the industry since the beginning of the pandemic, but still have relevant expertise they can deploy for tasks like transcription.

According to the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, in fact, almost a third of Canadian veterinarians and half of vet technicians are in the advanced stages of burnout — a psychological term for work-related mental and emotional exhaustion that gradually makes people less able to function professionally.

The association reports that long-standing, structural problems with the veterinary labour supply were amplified as more people bought or adopted pets during the pandemic, stretching an already overburdened system to the breaking point. The landscape is similar in the United States, where industry giant Mars Veterinary Health estimates a likely shortage of as many as 15,000 vets nationally by 2030.

Those burnt out workers may be unwilling to subject themselves to the pressures of helping operate an understaffed veterinary practice, but might still be willing to deploy their knowledge to help other vets do their jobs more efficiently.

So far, Talkatoo has about 38 employees, including 10 recently hired transcriptionists. Wilkie said the team’s largest market is the United States, with vets in Canada and parts of Europe and Oceania rounding out the client roster.

The company first raised money in the summer of 2019 — a $700,000 round led by Halifax’s Concrete Ventures — and then again in 2021, this time an undisclosed amount.

More recently, an injection of funding has taken the form of a strategic investment, rather than a broader capital raise. In the spring of 2021, Talkatoo became one of four Canadian startups accepted into the first cohort of the Google for Startups Accelerator: Voice AI edition. Now, the search and AI giant has bought into the company directly, although Wilkie was not actively raising capital, and he said the relationship will likely continue to deepen.

“We’re very happy with our partnership with Google, and I absolutely see that continuing,” he said.