Artificial Intelligence is radically changing the way we think of technology. It is progressing rapidly, with key advancements ranging from virtual assistants (such as Apple’s Siri and Microsoft Cortana) to fraud detection. This emerging tech now plays a part in everyday life.
Another study performed by Forrester Research predicted an increase of 300% in investment in AI this year (2017), compared to last year. “Artificial Intelligence” today includes a variety of technologies and tools, some time-tested, others relatively new.
Here are the 10 Amazing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in your daily life.
1. Virtual Personal Assistants
Virtual assistants can do anything from manage your schedule to organize your emails. Businesses can outsource tasks to virtual assistants in order to get more work done, quickly, efficiently and affordably. Siri, Google Now, and Cortana are all intelligent digital personal assistants on various platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile).
In short, they help find useful information when you ask for it using your voice; you can say “Where’s the nearest Chinese restaurant?”, “What’s on my schedule today?”, “Remind me to call Jerry at eight o’clock,” and the assistant will respond by finding information, relaying information from your phone, or sending commands to other apps.
2. Autonomous Cars
Just like a human, self-driving cars need to have sensors to understand the world around them and a brain that collects, processes and chooses specific actions based on information gathered. The same goes for self-driving cars, and each autonomous vehicle is outfitted with advanced tools to gather information, including long-range radar, LIDAR, cameras, short/medium-range radar, and ultrasound
Each of these technologies is used in different capacities, and each collects different information. However, this information is useless unless it is processed and some form of action is taken based on the gathered information. This is where Artificial Intelligence comes into play and can be compared to the human brain, and the actual goal of Artificial Intelligence is for a self-driving car to conduct in-depth learning.
3. Purchase Prediction
Large retailers like Target and Amazon stand to make a lot of money if they can anticipate your needs. Amazon’s anticipatory shipping project hopes to send you items before you need them, completely obviating the need for a last-minute trip to the online store. While that technology isn’t yet in place, brick-and-mortar retailers are using the same ideas with coupons; when you go to the store, you’re often given a number of coupons that have been selected by a predictive analytics algorithm.
This can be used in a wide variety of ways, whether it’s sending you coupons, offering you discounts, targeting advertisements, or stocking warehouses that are close to your home with products that you’re likely to buy.
4. Online Customer Support
Many websites now offer customers the opportunity to chat with a customer support representative while they’re browsing—but not every site actually has a live person on the other end of the line. In many cases, you’re talking to a rudimentary AI. Many of these chat support bots amount to little more than automated responders, but some of them are actually able to extract knowledge from the website and present it to customers when they ask for it.
Perhaps most interestingly, these chat bots need to be adept at understanding natural language, which is a rather difficult proposition; the way in which customers talk and the way in which computers talk is very different, and teaching a machine to translate between the two isn’t easy. But with rapid advances in natural language processing (NLP), these bots are getting better all the time.
5. Smart Home Devices
Anyone who’s used a device like Amazon’s Echo or Google’s Home smart speakers—the physical embodiments of the Alexa and Assistant software—knows that the experience is compelling. Asking for a specific song over dinner, adjusting the settings on your thermostat, or setting a timer while cooking all make life just that little bit more pleasant.
Lighting is another place where you might see basic artificial intelligence; by setting defaults and preferences, the lights around your house (both inside and outside) might adjust based on where you are and what you’re doing; dimmer for watching TV, brighter for cooking, and somewhere in the middle for eating, for example. The uses of AI in smart homes are limited only by our imagination.
6. Video Games
One of the instances of AI that most people are probably familiar with, video game AI has been used for a very long time—since the very first video games, in fact. But the complexity and effectiveness of that AI has increased exponentially over the past several decades, resulting in video game characters that learn your behaviors, respond to stimuli, and react in unpredictable ways.
First-person shooters like Far Cry and Call of Duty also make significant use of AI, with enemies that can analyze their environments to find objects or actions that might be beneficial to their survival; they’ll take cover, investigate sounds, use flanking maneuvers, and communicate with other AIs to increase their chances of victory.
7. Music And Movie Recommendation Services
There are many different kinds of information associated with music that could aid recommendation: tags, artist and album information, lyrics, text mined from the web (reviews, interviews, …), and the audio signal itself.
By monitoring the choices you make and inserting them into a learning algorithm, these apps make recommendations that you’re likely to be interested in. Much of this functionality is dependent on human-assigned factors. For example, a song might have “driving bass,” “dynamic vocals,” and “guitar riffs” listed as characteristics; if you like that song, you’ll probably like other songs that include the same characteristics.
8. News Content Generation
AI isn’t writing in-depth investigative articles, but it has no problem with very simple articles that don’t require a lot of synthesis.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Post back in 2013, AI-powered journalism was in its infancy. A handful of companies with automated content-generating systems, like Narrative Science and Automated Insights, were capable of producing the bare-bones, data-heavy news items familiar to sports fans and stock analysts. But strategists at the Post saw the potential for an AI system that could generate explanatory, insightful articles.
9. Security Surveillance
While some traditional security measures in place today do have a significant impact in terms of decreasing crime or preventing theft, today video analytics gives security officers a technological edge that no surveillance camera alone can provide.
Surveillance systems that include video analytics analyze video footage in real-time and detect abnormal activities that could pose a threat to an organization’s security. Essentially, video analytics technology helps security software “learn” what is normal so it can identify unusual, and potentially harmful, behavior that a human alone may miss.
10. Fraud Detection
Cybercrime is estimated to cost the global economy 400 billion dollars (source McAfee). Credit card fraud accounts for a large proportion of this cost. While fraud detection techniques have been used for decades, the industry now faces new challenges. Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are proposed to overcome the increasing challenges of online fraud. AI techniques are gaining popularity due to the power of Deep Learning Algorithms.