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Using Azure AI Speech and OpenAI models, ALIANDO worked with VoiceLove to analyze patient sentiment and support communication and scale for healthcare.
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated a critical challenge in healthcare: patient isolation. For providers caring for severely ill adults, children, and neonates in intensive care units (ICUs, PICUs, and NICUs), connecting patients with their families proved exceptionally difficult when patients were unable to use standard phones or tablets. This communication gap left already overburdened care teams searching for an efficient, accessible solution.
VoiceLove, a digital therapeutics company advancing rapid-response cognitive interventions, recognized this isolation gap and envisioned a "voice-first" communication platform to deliver family- voice therapeutic content to patients. To transform this vision into a reality that could serve major healthcare organizations, VoiceLove required a partner to support its efforts to build a scalable, therapeutic communications solution.
Addressing these challenges requires a new approach combining cloud infrastructure and AI capabilities. ALIANDO worked with organizations, like VoiceLove, to design and implement solutions on Microsoft Azure. Through its participation in the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, ALIANDO brings AI-certified expertise, Microsoft-provided training, and access to Microsoft-backed funding to support the development and scaling of AI-driven solutions.
ALIANDO applied this approach in its work with VoiceLove, -ALIANDO supported VoiceLove’s earliest efforts to develop its therapeutic voice platform by helping to procure Microsoft Azure and provide them with cloud solutions and & support. As VoiceLove continued to expand the capabilities of its platform, it came back to ALIANDO with more advanced requirements.
Founded by clinical professionals and supported by grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, the company’s earliest work focused on enabling families to record and share messages with patients. Scaling the platform for commercial use however, required infrastructure, HIPAA-compliant data architecture, and Microsoft AI expertise––all of which VoiceLove’s development team does not have in-house.
Addressing communication challenges in patient care
COVID-19 isolation policies limited in-person visits for hospitalized patients, reducing opportunities for direct communication with family members. For critically ill patients - isolation can accelerate cognitive decline, and without the reassurance of a known voice, patients often become either non-responsive or highly agitated. - Human connection is a biological necessity; without it, patients frequently experience slower recovery and permanently diminished cognitive function.
VoiceLove set out to address this isolation gap by building a voice-based platform for healthcare settings, focused on enabling patients to hear familiar voices from loved ones without adding to the workload burden of the nursing staff. Rather than a simple audio player, the solution will also incorporate speech processing and sentiment analysis to help interpret patient input and provide additional context for therapeutic intervention. Bobby Lynch, CMO of ALIANDO, compared the approach to the principles behind music therapy, noting that it offers a way to support patient wellbeing and engagement outside of pharmacologic or physical intervention.
The founders brought clinical backing, NIH funding, and a development team skilled at building applications. However, they had not implemented Microsoft AI services at scale before, and they needed a partner who had. And the demand was clear: even before the platform was fully built, VoiceLove had been approached by several organizations about their platform.
"They were eager for us to finish these services and APIs very quickly,” said Patrick Shelton, sales account representative at ALIANDO. “They had several healthcare organizations interested in testing their platform and applications, including Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
“By putting things into Cosmos DB, we’re able to build metadata indexes... that help pull this data back out to the patient or to the doctor as they need it.”
— Chris Savage, CTO, ALIANDO
Building voice-first care on Azure
ALIANDO approached the engagement as a strategic technical partnership, beginning with ideation sessions to define both immediate architectural requirements and a longer-term scalability roadmap. Working closely with VoiceLove, the team shaped the technical infrastructure using best practices for API security, data architecture, and endpoint management. Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program funding supported the engagement, helping accelerate early development.
ALIANDO began by establishing a secure foundation. Microsoft Azure provided a HIPAA-compliant environment necessary or VoiceLove to securely manage sensitive Protected Health Information (PHI), including recordings, transcripts, and associated signals, in accordance with federal PHI –protected health information and HIPA Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requirements.
The platform’s core AI capabilities will be powered by Azure AI Speech, which will facilitate the transcribing of a patient’s response and convert text responses back into a family member’s recorded voice. To provide context and alerts for care teams, ALIANDO integrated a GPT-4o model for sentiment analysis, enabling the platform to identify potential patient distress and surface that signal to care providers for further review.
For optimized data storage, and retrieval, ALIANDO guided VoiceLove toward Azure Cosmos DB, which made the platform meaningfully more responsive by allowing it to index and organize data more effectively, improving how information could be retrieved and used within the application.
“By putting things into Cosmos DB, we’re able to build metadata indexes... that help pull this data back out to the patient or to the care provider as they need it,” said Chris Savage, ALIANDO’s CTO.
ALIANDO also built the infrastructure using Microsoft Terraform, an infrastructure-as-code approach that allows VoiceLove to add new hospitals, services, and endpoints without a full re-architecture each time. “We started small, but they knew they were going to grow big as they pushed this out to more hospitals and healthcare providers,” said Savage. “We knew they were going to need the scalability of Terraform.”
“The fact that AI can do this and change and positively impact so many lives––I think it’s pretty remarkable,”
— Patrick Shelton, sales account representative, ALIANDO
Expanding reach and a new confidence
As VoiceLove deploys the platform in hospital settings, its early results are promising. As an example, a patient in an ICU, who was highly agitated, when hearing their family member’s voice delivered through the platform, experienced “instant relief” Savage described.
These initial observations reinforced the clinical thesis: digitally delivered family voices carry the potential to significantly alleviate care team burden, and improve patient outcomes and experiences when physical presence is limited. “The fact that AI can do this and change and positively impact so many lives––I think it’s pretty remarkable,” said Shelton.
Supported by the highly scalable Azure architecture implemented by ALIANDO, VoiceLove is actively exploring how the platform can be adapted across a wider continuum of hospital settings and alternative care environments. Together, these early deployments illustrate how secure, scalable voice-based technologies built on Azure can profoundly elevate the standard of patient care.
