LAIKA
LAIKA is an AI assistant built specifically for veterinarians. It answers clinical questions on dogs and cats, reads uploaded laboratory PDFs, suggests differential diagnoses and turns recorded consultations into automatic clinical notes.
What is LAIKA?
LAIKA is a web-based artificial intelligence assistant designed exclusively for veterinary practice, published by AITEM S.r.l., a Turin company that is a spin-off of DUMAREY Automotive Italia S.p.A. The vendor describes it as a virtual colleague rather than a diagnostic authority: it supports the clinical process without replacing the practitioner's judgement.
The tool covers a full consultation. It helps structure the case history, records the consultation and generates the clinical note automatically, reads and interprets laboratory results uploaded as PDF files, proposes differential diagnoses and diagnostic pathways, and assists with treatment selection and dosage. Two interaction modes coexist: patient mode, where every exchange is anchored to one animal's record and uploaded documents, and a generic chat for general clinical questions with no patient attached. Questions can be typed or dictated, and answers arrive in nine to twenty seconds according to the publisher.
Technically, LAIKA is a conversational agent built on a combination of large language models. AITEM names Llama, Meta's model, as its foundation and mentions collaboration with NVIDIA on performance; its own list of sub-processors additionally names OpenAI, Fireworks.ai, Groq and Cerebras. Training material was selected by a team of five veterinarians and supplemented with more than 70,000 labelled diagnoses gathered through partnerships with clinics, hospitals and laboratories. Validation ran for four months with a hundred Italian health directors using the system daily and correcting its answers.
The publisher claims seven per cent better accuracy than the best of a five-veterinarian panel, seventeen per cent above their average, and fifteen per cent above GPT — figures it has not supported with a published study. It also states one honest limitation: results are sensitive to how a question is phrased.
LAIKA runs in any browser on desktop, tablet or mobile, with no native application. Interface languages are Italian, English, French and Spanish. Veterinary practice management systems can embed it through a documented API, and integrations already exist for RoboVet, Ascend and Provet Cloud. Use is contractually restricted to veterinarians registered with their professional body, and clinically restricted to dogs and cats.
What it does
- Ask clinical questions on dogs and cats in plain language and get differential diagnosis suggestions
- Upload a laboratory report as a PDF and have the abnormal parameters extracted and interpreted
- Record a consultation and receive an automatically generated clinical note
- Work in patient mode, with the reasoning anchored to one animal's own record and documents
- Open a generic chat for clinical questions that are not tied to any particular patient
- Dictate a question by voice and have it transcribed instantly into text
- Connect a practice management system so that patients flow into LAIKA automatically
When to use LAIKA / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if LAIKA is the right fit.
When to use LAIKA
- Solo veterinarians running their own practice who want occasional expert back-up at a cost they control
- Clinic and small-practice managers handling a wide range of daily cases who need consistent, always-available support
- Managers of large veterinary structures and emergency services where several practitioners must share the same clinical assistant
- Veterinary technicians working alongside practitioners on team accounts and shared patient records
- Vendors of veterinary practice management software (PMS) who want to embed LAIKA in their platform through its published API
When not to use LAIKA
- Pet owners and the general public: the software terms expressly exclude anyone qualifying as a consumer
- Human-medicine clinicians: this is a veterinary product, and AITEM's chest X-ray tool AIPPO CXR is a separate offering
- Practices treating species other than dogs and cats, which are the only animals the terms cover
- Anyone looking for an autonomous diagnostic system: the vendor repeatedly states that the tool supports and never replaces clinical judgement
- Buyers who require a named security certification or a documented data-hosting jurisdiction before signing, as neither is published
How to use LAIKA
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Register on the LAIKA website: the fourteen-day free trial needs neither a subscription nor a payment method
- Wait for the activation confirmation email, which leads to the page where a plan is chosen
- Follow the built-in guided tour, or watch the eight tutorial videos on the help page
- Create a patient record with the species, owner and date of birth
- Open a chat attached to that patient to work in patient mode
- Upload laboratory results as a PDF using the upload button inside the chat
- Phrase questions as you would to a colleague rather than as keywords, following the vendor's guidance
- Use the generic chat for questions that are not tied to a specific animal
- Record a consultation with Scriber and retrieve the generated note from the notes list
- Connect a practice management system from the Integrations page, or request activation if the clinic is not yet linked
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Genuine veterinary specialisation, deliberately positioned against general-purpose chatbots
- A validation protocol that is described publicly: five veterinarians selecting material, over 70,000 labelled diagnoses, four months of daily testing by a hundred health directors
- Complete and downloadable legal documentation: software terms, full data processing agreement with a security annex, privacy and cookie policies, in English and Italian
- An actual list of sub-processors is published, with its update date — still uncommon among tools of this size
- A fourteen-day trial with no card and no commitment
- An entry plan with no fixed monthly fee, suited to occasional use
- The publisher documents its own limitation on question phrasing instead of hiding it
Cons
- No security certification of any kind: no ISO 27001, no SOC 2, no certificate number and no certifying body anywhere on the site
- No hosting country or region is declared; the agreement provides for standard contractual clauses without naming a destination
- Nothing is said about whether customer data is used to train the models, and no opt-out is documented
- The accuracy figures, including the comparison with GPT, are vendor claims with no published study or third-party assessor
- Three generations of pricing coexist on the site and contradict one another, including on the entry price
- The FAQ is out of date: it still says generic questions are not possible, although generic chat is a live feature
- Clinical scope is limited to dogs and cats, and the recording feature depends on a third party whose terms must be accepted separately
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanent free plan, but a fourteen-day free trial is offered without a subscription or a payment method. The cheapest paid entry point is the Pay Per Use plan, which carries no fixed monthly fee and is billed at 5 EUR per consultation, excluding VAT. Subscriptions start at 55 EUR per month for the Unlimited plan, or 495 EUR per year instead of 660 EUR, and at 65 EUR per month for the Team plan, which includes two accounts. Additional accounts cost 10 EUR per month each. All amounts are quoted net of VAT, and payment is taken in advance by card.
- Pay Per Use — no fixed monthly fee
- 5 EUR excl. VAT per personalised consultation
- one account
- requests and analyses stay active for 72 hours
- after which the chat is read-only or a new paid consultation is required
- Unlimited — 55 EUR excl. VAT per month
- one account
- unlimited patient records and consultations
- 24/7 answers
- laboratory analysis
- differential diagnoses and unlimited use of the recording and clinical-note feature
- Unlimited annual — 495 EUR excl. VAT per year instead of 660 EUR
- advertised as a 25% saving of 165 EUR
- with additional accounts at 90 EUR per slot per year
- Team — 65 EUR excl. VAT per month including two accounts
- plus 10 EUR per month for each additional account
- with no limit on the number of members
- adds team-working features on top of the Unlimited scope
- Free trial — fourteen days
- common to all plans
- with no subscription and no payment method required
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how LAIKA handles your data.
GDPR overview
Implementation is concrete rather than declarative. AITEM states that it processes customer data in compliance with Regulation (EU) 2016/679 and the Italian Privacy Code, and it publishes a full data processing agreement, updated 12 November 2025, downloadable as a PDF. That agreement appoints the veterinarian as controller and AITEM as processor, lists the sub-processors in an appendix, sets out detailed security measures, provides for standard contractual clauses on transfers outside the EEA, and gives exclusive jurisdiction to the Court of Turin. A data protection officer is named and reachable by email. Being established in Italy, the company needs no Article 27 representative. One caveat: the privacy policy on the corporate website covers only that showcase site, and still shows an outdated registered address. The facts above come from the software's own legal documents.
Who owns the data?
The roles are stated explicitly. Under the published data processing agreement, the licensed veterinarian is the data controller and AITEM S.r.l. is the data processor: the practice keeps ownership of, and responsibility for, the patient and client data it uploads. AITEM may use those personal data only to deliver the service described in the terms of use. The software itself is the other way round: AITEM owns all rights to it, including copyright, trade marks, patents, trade secrets and know-how, and grants only a temporary, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence. At the end of the retention period the personal data are deleted, or returned to the controller on request, subject to legal retention duties.
Reuse rights
Customers keep control of what they put in. AITEM undertakes to use personal data only to perform the terms of use, and the veterinarian, as controller, decides the purposes and means of the processing. Further processors may be appointed, but only with prior written notice, a written contract and strictly limited access; the current list is published in an appendix and names Amazon Web Services, OpenAI, Fireworks.ai, DeepL, Groq and Cerebras. Transfers outside the European Economic Area are allowed only under the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. Two limits deserve attention. The vendor asks the veterinarian to anonymise or pseudonymise any personal data that are not needed for the diagnosis before uploading a file. And nothing at all is said about whether customer content is used to train AI models, so no opt-out is documented either. The optional Scriber recording feature is supplied by a third party, SONICBYTES Inc., whose own terms must be accepted separately, and which requires the animal owner's explicit consent before each recording.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
AITEM does not name any hosting country or region. The data processing agreement provides for the European Commission's standard contractual clauses whenever personal data leave the European Economic Area, but it does not say where the platform actually runs, and the appendix listing sub-processors names Amazon Web Services without specifying a region. The publisher describes a cloud platform giving stable access to users anywhere in the world, which is a statement about availability rather than about location. Jurisdiction is clearer than geography: the agreement gives exclusive competence to the Court of Turin, the controller is the licensed veterinarian and the processor is an Italian company, and a data protection officer is named. Buyers with data-residency requirements will need to ask AITEM directly, because the published documents do not answer the question.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting LAIKA.
- Automation bias: a confident-sounding differential diagnosis can quietly become the practitioner's own conclusion, and the vendor itself warns that the tool must not replace clinical judgement
- Answer quality depends on how the question is phrased, which the publisher acknowledges — an ambiguous prompt can produce a plausible but poorly grounded reply
- Erosion of diagnostic reasoning over time if the assistant is consulted before, rather than after, the practitioner's own analysis
- Client data exposure: laboratory PDFs often carry the owner's identity, and the burden of anonymising them before upload rests on the veterinarian
- Consultation recording involves a third-party provider and requires the animal owner's explicit consent each time, which is easy to forget in a busy clinic
- The accuracy figures published on the site are the vendor's own and have no third-party verification, so they should not be relied on for clinical assurance
- No security certification and no declared hosting jurisdiction, which matters for a system handling clinical records
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low for the intended user. LAIKA runs in a browser with nothing to install: registering opens a fourteen-day trial with no payment method, and a guided tour plus eight tutorial videos cover the first steps. Connecting a supported practice management system takes a few clicks from the Integrations page, or a short activation request if the clinic is not yet linked. The only demanding path is the API route, which is aimed at software vendors rather than practitioners: it involves a thirty-three-page reference and a preliminary call with AITEM's technical and business development teams.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind LAIKA
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
How does the free trial work?
Who is allowed to use LAIKA?
Which animals does LAIKA cover?
What documents can I upload, and what happens to them?
How fast does LAIKA answer?
What was LAIKA trained on?
Is there an API, and which practice management systems are supported?
Is there a mobile app?
Who is responsible for the patient data?
Which interface languages are available?
Should you pick LAIKA?
LAIKA is one of the more carefully built vertical assistants in its category. It does not pretend to be a general chatbot pointed at animals: the scope is deliberately narrow — dogs and cats, qualified veterinarians only — and the vendor describes both its validation protocol and its own weaknesses in public. The three-part offer, from a per-consultation plan with no fixed fee up to a team subscription, maps onto the three buyer profiles the site names, and the fourteen-day trial without a card makes the tool cheap to evaluate.
The legal groundwork is unusually complete for a company of this size. A full data processing agreement is published rather than promised, the roles of controller and processor are stated plainly, and the list of sub-processors is actually disclosed and dated. That transparency has a flip side: the same documents make clear what is missing. There is no security certification, no named hosting jurisdiction, and no statement at all about whether customer content feeds model training.
Two practical cautions before signing. Pricing is inconsistent across the site, with the entry rate given as both five and fifteen euros per consultation depending on the block of text you read, and an older price appearing in the homepage structured data — confirm the current figure with the vendor. And several published claims, including the accuracy comparison against GPT, rest on the publisher's own word.
For a practice that already trusts its clinicians and wants a specialised second opinion, the tool is credible and reasonably priced. For a buyer whose procurement checklist starts with certifications and data residency, the answers are simply not on the site yet.
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