Vocal biomarker startup Sonde has been quietly plotting a way to make tracking respiratory and

mental health as simple as chatting to a smartphone voice assistant.

The Boston-based company, which was founded in 2015, has raised $19 million for its
technology that uses brief voice recordings to reveal the progression of health conditions.
On Thursday, Sonde announced a new partnership with chip manufacturing giant
Qualcomm that could potentially bring the technology to millions of smartphones, which
could prove a crucial test of whether its tech is ready for prime time.

Sonde’s technology — based on more than 1 million voice samples from 80,000 people —
uses subtle characteristics of voice collected for this purpose to determine that you may
have a medical condition. It claims the technology can be used to detect symptoms of
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, and Covid-19, as well as characteristics of
what it calls “mental fitness.”

Sonde’s new partnership could help the startup reach a far broader audience by integrating
its technology directly into Qualcomm 888 and 778 5G chips that will be used in mid-range
and top-tier phones from leading manufacturers toward the end of this year and in 2022.
Several devices using the 888, including phones from Samsung and Sony, have already
shipped, and Sonde’s capability will be available to them as well. The recently announced
888+ will also have Sonde capabilities when released.

Sonde CEO David Liu predicts that as smartphone makers continue to compete on
features, health technologies will become an important differentiator.

“I think it’s going to be conspicuous in its absence, rather than you have one manufacturer
that has all these great innovations in health protection [and] monitoring,” he told STAT.

It’ll be up to phone manufacturers like Samsung to decide if they want to tap into Sonde’s
technology — for a price — and how they want to use it. If phone makers choose to buy in,
users will be able have their voices analyzed through a baked-in feature already installed in
the phone.

How the tool is used — including whether it takes a one-time reading or collects samples in
the background without needing to be activated — will depend on manufacturer
preferences. Any implementation would require a user to opt-in and the company says data
will not be sent to third parties.

Though smartphones are the most obvious application of the tech, Liu suggests such
integration could easily make its way to in-car information systems, smart speakers, and
other household devices that Qualcomm powers.

One smartphone maker that won’t take up the Sonde technology anytime soon: Apple,
which develops its own chips. But Liu points out how the tech giant is removing some of
the roadblocks that have long hampered advanced voice-based technologies. At the
Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple announced that its voice-activated
assistant Siri will process speech entirely on devices, allowing many requests to be
completed without access to the internet, cutting out the cloud connection currently needed
for even basic Siri queries.

On-device processing could speed up the analysis of voice recordings and helps ensure the
privacy of the captured data, which has long been a concern around voice-controlled
features. Removing friction from the experience, Liu argued, could open the door for wider
adoption of the vocal technologies like the biomarker system Sonde has been developing
and illustrates the potential value of building its tech natively into smartphones.

“What it means is that throughout the day, as you speak into the phone for Siri or for
whatever you use your voice, your smartphone turns into a fitness tracker via voice,” said
Liu. “You’re basically able to use your smartphone as if it were your Apple Watch, as if it
were your Fitbit wristband, as if it was your Oura ring. But you don’t need those devices.
That is to me, the biggest game changer that [on-device] processing allows.”

Beyond its ambitions to sell to phone manufacturers, Sonde will soon detail a consumer
app that allows users to track the progression of their mental fitness. Sonde has also
created tools so that third-party mental health apps can easily incorporate its biomarkers to
track how well treatments are working. The company has explored using its biomarkers to
help pharmaceutical companies develop drugs. It says it has16 partners using its
technology.

As it aims to stand out, Sonde’s integration with Qualcomm chips provides a high-profile
partner that could boost its reach. Qualcomm will soon begin marketing the tech to
manufacturers who are anxious to stay ahead of Apple, which, given its focus on health and
voice, may also have a similar feature in the offing.

“I think everyone is trying to one up Apple any way they can,” said Liu. “We can talk about it
any way we want, but at the end of the day, the goal is to get more mobile devices out into
the hands of consumers.”