Our voices are amazing things.

We can use them to sing, shout and whisper sweet nothings. We can use them to activate gadgets and prove who we are to banks.

And now researchers believe they can also reveal whether we’re getting ill.

A US start-up called Canary Speech is developing a way of analysing conversations using machine learning to test for a number of neurological and cognitive diseases, ranging from Parkinson’s to dementia.

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