#434 Vocal biomarkers: Detecting the unspoken with Kang Hsu from Canary Speech

In this episode of The Healthtech Podcast, we’re joined by Kang Hsu, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Canary Speech, to explore the emerging field of vocal biomarkers and what they could mean for earlier disease detection.

Speech is more than language. It is airflow, vocal cord vibration, neuromuscular control and cognitive processing in motion. Subtle acoustic features such as pitch variation, jitter, shimmer and timing patterns can reflect underlying physiological and neurological change.Can those signals help detect depression, anxiety, mild cognitive impairment or even early neurodegenerative disease?

Kang brings a rare perspective. As a practising physician and former Chief Medical Informatics Officer within a major US health system, he led large-scale EHR implementations and AI deployments across a 50+ hospital network. He understands both the science and the realities of adoption at system level.

This conversation covers:

• What vocal biomarkers are and how they are measured• How 40 seconds of natural speech can generate thousands of acoustic data points

• Clinical applications across behavioural health and neurology• Sensitivity, specificity and the limits of current evidence

• What makes clinicians trust and adopt new AI tools

• Why seamless workflow integration is critical for scale

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