We are bringing new capabilities starting August 1st that empower you to have better and more informed conversations with your vet or qualified healthcare professional.

Now, you can add a 'Veterinary Contact' to dogAdvisor Max, which empowers him to reach out to your vet on your behalf if you're facing an important situation and need to get help right away, access further additional optimisations to our sharing system, which will now empower healthcare providers to access a full transcript of your chats and conversations as well as the Situation Summaries that veterinarians love, and finally you'll soon be able to export results from the Health tab directly to your device, empowering you to have better and more informed conversions with healthcare providers. We will roll out some features as a limited research preview, including upgrades to the send to vet feature, before assessing their usage and safety, and deciding whether to extend their rollout.

The first update we're making this morning is introducing Veterinary Contact. Approved dog owners will now be able to privately set a 'Veterinary Contact' whose details Max will keep on file during your conversations. Currently, veterinary contact supports email addresses of your qualified healthcare professionals, though we look forward to extending this to include direct Phone and Text capabilities with additional improvements to dogAdvisor Max.

Now, if you're facing an imminent medical emergency with Emergency Guidance on dogAdvisor Max, he can now instantly suggest he reaches out to your Veterinary Contact during your conversation. Max will now share a full transcript of your conversation with him to your veterinary professional, and will include important and relevant information about you as part of Veterinary Contact, including your full name, address, pet's name, pet health records, and any other information you submitted as part of Veterinary Contact. Importantly, as part of the safety features of dogAdvisor Max, he will ask for your direct authorisation to send this information to your healthcare professional before doing so, and you'll be able to see the information he'll share and who he'll share it to in the Veterinary Contact Sheet. You can then easily adjust any relevant information on the fly and then send this information, send the current information on file, or chose not to send this data, and contact your vet yourself.

However, some dog owner may decide this is simply too time consuming in cases of emergency, so they'll now be able to see how Max proactively handles this situation where he will start formatting your sending documents, notify you he's preparing to send information to your healthcare provider, and easily review what he's about to send. Importantly, you will have the ability to stop this transfer if it's been made by mistake, but owners will see a countdown from 10 after which Max will automatically send this information to healthcare providers.

It's important to note that this feature is designed not to involve AI activity during the process. Rather, Veterinary Contact is designed to be as mechanistic and predictable as possible, simply sharing core information on file as text whilst also sharing transcripts of your chats without making any adjustments. This is part of the safety guardrails we've designed into Veterinary Contact, and you can read more about the safety and performance features we've delivered in our Veterinary Contact Research Paper.

The second update we're bringing with Veterinary Contact is significant changes to your ability to share chats with healthcare providers. Previously, as part of Max Generation 4, we introduced Send to Vet as a feature designed to bring healthcare professionals immediate summaries of your discussions with Max, which has since been used more than 30 thousand times since launch. However, we increasingly noticed reduced usage of this feature in longer and more medically complex discussions as Send to Vet was limited in its abilities, only being able to send summaries within a certain character limit. So today, we are scrapping Send to Vet from dogAdvisor Max, and replacing it with a simple Conversation Share sheet, that now empowers you to send a full copy of your conversation to anyone like a vet or a friend in need of advice!

In order to prevent risks of abuse or spam, this share feature is handled in two separate ways. For healthcare providers who've listed you as a 'Trusted Contact' through Veterinary Contact, we will be able to reach out to them directly on your behalf as they've confirmed their relationship with you. So if you're sharing to a vet or healthcare professional who is a Trusted Contact, we will send conversation shares to them directly with your approval. For healthcare professionals who haven't listed you as a Trusted Contact, or for people outside of your Veterinary Contact, we will handle this conversation sharing on your device in order to prevent abuse to our systems.

This feature does carry additional safeguards and capabilities. First, Conversation Share will not be available for conversations at or shorter than 3 messages, and Conversation Share won't be available for conversations which have been Safety Stopped more than once in a conversation. This means that chats which have been safety stopped twice or more times aren't eligible for Conversation Share, in order to discourage and prevent users from sharing information about activity that intentionally violated our policies. You can read more about these safeguards and how they work in the Veterinary Contact Research Paper.

The final feature we're introducing with Veterinary Contact is the ability to share previous, current, and trend health results from the Health tab directly with your qualified medical professional. If you've added your medical professional as a Veterinary Contact, and they've added you back as a Trusted Contact, you'll now be able to share your specific or trend health results directly with them in just two taps by authorising what you'd like to send, confirming the details of your message are accurate, and sending your results directly. Veterinary Contact's Health sharing is only available by email, so you must ensure you have your vet's contact email which they have confirmed as accurate by adding you back as a Trusted Contact.

We have always believed that dogAdvisor Max exists as a tool to support your dog's health and support your care together with qualified medical professionals, and we're excited to be making such a meaningful step forward in this vision with Veterinary Contact, empowering dog owners to have more informed conversations with healthcare providers through dogAdvisor Max, rather than using Max to replace the qualified judgement of professionals.

Of course, this is just a very quick look at all the features we expect to deliver with Veterinary Contact. We are expecting a gradual rollout of these features over the next few weeks and months, and will continue to update Max with these announcements regularly. If you're new to dogAdvisor Max, you might be prompted to add a Veterinary Contact throughout your conversation, and we look forward to seeing how this feature develops over time. This announcement was a broader look at what Veterinary Contact does and how it can support you in conversations with your healthcare providers, but we publish more detailed information on how this feature works as well as more detailed safety insights on when this feature activates in our Veterinary Contact Research Paper, which is free to access to anyone and also published on dogAdvisor Research House. We can't wait to bring these amazing new capabilities to the thousands of dog owners who use Max every month, and look forward to seeing how they develop.