Soula app teams up with Google to provide pregnancy and parenting support

Cyprus-based femtech start-up Soula app has partnered up with Google to provide pregnancy and parenting support.

Soula will use the tech giant’s Med-PaLM, a large language model (LLM) designed to generate answers to medical questions, to offer women pregnancy, postpartum and maternity support via its “AI-powered” assistant.

The app, previously backed by model Natalia Vodianova, will be able to answer questions on pregnancy and maternity matters and offer information regarding various health-related concerns.

It will also be able to assist in tracking foetal movement and kick frequency and address lifestyle inquiries regarding nutrition, sleep, physical activity, and emotional self-care.

“While human experts are quite expensive and not readily available at all hours of the day, AI provides a valuable complement to them by effectively addressing the concerns of pregnant women around the clock, ensuring continuous care and support,” said Natallia Miranchuk, founder and CEO of Soula.

“Through Med-PaLM 2 and fine-tune by parenthood educators and certified doulas expertise, Soula aims to revolutionise AI-powered support for women before, during pregnancy and postpartum, ensuring ethic and empathetic communication on sensitive matters and providing emotional comfort without compromising their physical health.

“The fact that Google has shown trust in Soula and its mission means that we are doing the right thing.”

With the assistance of the medical LLM, Miranchuk says Soula tailors personalised responses and provides women with factual responses to queries about the locations of nearby medical centres based on the user’s location.

The assistant, the company argues, showcases a new range of chatbot abilities in the field of mental health, providing factual replies, up-to-date statistics, and addressing emotional issues. It also offers guidance on breastfeeding, postpartum physical recovery and postpartum depression.

In addition to providing access to its Med-PaLM 2 LLM, Google Cloud has awarded Soula $350,000 worth of credits to fine-tune the chatbot and give access to new technological opportunities.