July 7, 2026
What can go wrong when you let AI handle incoming patient calls in an Australian GP surgery? Quite a few things, it turns out.
At our latest G-EE-K event in Melbourne, Dr Kevin Ong, Co-Founder, CEO and CTO of Voral.ai, and Principal AI Consultant at Equal Experts Australia, shared his experiences and what he learned when AI was deployed on a live phone line in Australian healthcare practices.
From phantom bookings and four-second silent gaps to dealing with data sovereignty and unique Australian accents, it was a production headache. Rather than sharing polished architecture diagrams and theory, Kevin shared the hard-won lessons from the fixes that followed.
In a controlled demo environment, voice AI looks fantastic. You have clean audio, a quiet background, one caller, one practice, and latency stays under 200 milliseconds. But that doesn’t match real-world general practice conditions, where background noise, rush-hour stress and human behaviour create chaotic variables that can’t be caught in a standard unit test.
Kevin highlighted several critical issues that can quickly cause issues and erode patient or clinical trust:
Kevin argued that using AI in healthcare requires far more than just technical competence. Patients and clinicians don’t judge the quality of an AI model; they want to know if they can trust it with their health. Does it provide the right information? Does it escalate issues safely when needed? Does it improve the overall experience?
If patients can’t trust it, they’ll be more likely to leave the practice and find another GP where they can feel more comfortable. For clinicians, trust means knowing the system’s guardrails have been actively supported, verified and signed off by a practising medical doctor.
In Australian healthcare, data sovereignty is a strict legal mandate. A patient’s voice data, detailing their symptoms, mental health crises, and clinical diagnoses, cannot legally leave the country. Kevin warned against an issue with mainstream AI offerings, where many vendors claim to store data in Australia but do not explain where that data is processed.
The regulatory landscape in Australia enforces this strictly. By 10 December 2026, organisations will have to explicitly disclose if AI is making decisions about patients and if data is being processed overseas under reforms to the Privacy Act. Violating this can carry severe penalties. With true sovereign infrastructure in Australia scarce, Kevin explained how Voral.ai chose to build its own voice infrastructure, rather than rent.
Most AI solutions are engineered globally and optimised for US-based demographics, focusing almost exclusively on English and Spanish speakers. But the reality across Australia is vastly different: 20% of the population speaks a language other than English at home, and up to 5% does not speak English at all.
If automated phone systems only support fluent English speakers, culturally and linguistically diverse communities are left severely underserved. Non-English-speaking patients frequently rely on their children to call and navigate clinic bookings. If those children are at work or busy with their own lives, the patient is effectively cut off from healthcare.
To build an equitable system, Kevin explained how Voral.ai developed a multilingual pipeline processing English, Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Italian natively from speech-in to speech-out. Crucially, they found the hardest hurdle wasn’t just managing multiple languages, but instead it was processing Australian accents. Generic US-hosted models caused significant drops in accuracy because they failed to understand Australian accents and local vernacular. True equity means building systems that understand patients exactly as they speak.
We’d like to thank Kevin for sharing his experiences at our recent G-EE-K talk. G-EE-K, also known as G[=]K, is Equal Experts’ technology event series. More than just talks for technology practitioners, they embody our core values of knowledge sharing, fostering communities and uplifting individuals with new skills or capabilities that they can take back to their own organisations.
Missed out on this G-EE-K talk? Watch out for details of future events in Sydney and Melbourne. If you’re interested in learning more about Equal Experts or our Network, contact me and the rest of the Australia team now.
Prasanna Murugavel is Head of People and Community at Equal Experts APAC. With more than 20 years of experience in global HR, Prasanna is a hands-on people leader committed to achieving organisational success and accelerated business growth. Connect with Prasanna on LinkedIn.
All business models have their pros and cons. But, when you consider the type of problems we help our clients to solve at Equal Experts, it’s worth thinking about the level of experience and the best consultancy approach to solve them.
If you’d like to find out more about working with us – get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.
