Finding a doctor's appointment by voice, in Greek

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Greece has a public system for booking appointments with doctors in public hospitals, health centres and doctors contracted with the national insurer (ΕΟΠΥΥ). It works, but finding the earliest free slot near you means filling in a form, picking a specialty from a long official list, choosing a region, and repeating the search for each kind of provider. On a phone, that is a lot of tapping.

I built a voice front end for it. You say something like «πονάει το γόνατό μου, θέλω ραντεβού στη Θεσσαλονίκη την άλλη εβδομάδα» (“my knee hurts, I want an appointment in Thessaloniki next week”) and the app shows the nearest units and doctors with the earliest free dates. Booking still happens on the official portal.

Teaching a machine to hear a Greek municipal council

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is an English adaptation of a post I originally wrote in Greek for the Schema Labs Substack. The original is here: Μαθαίνοντας μια μηχανή να ακούει ένα ελληνικό δημοτικό συμβούλιο.

OpenCouncil transcribes Greek municipal council meetings with ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition), and then someone fixes the AI’s mistakes by hand. The team spends several hours on each meeting to get those corrections right, so the final transcript matches the audio. That led us to a question: can we fine-tune an open ASR model on OpenCouncil’s own data and cut down the time spent on manual corrections? I’m Angelos, and this is the problem I’m working on for my Google Summer of Code project.

Greek NLP on Angelos Papamichail

Finding a doctor's appointment by voice, in Greek

Teaching a machine to hear a Greek municipal council