Chris Knight
AI is a massive buzzword in most technologies, but what are the real benefits to us? With AI chips in smartphones, smart home appliances like refrigerators and increasingly in services and apps. Here's how AI is helping your life in 2019 and beyond,
When you talk to Siri, Alexa, Google Home or any of the other number of smart home devices, there isn't some magic generating the response. Instead, the device or cloud service it connects to uses AI algorithms to break down your speech into text data, understand what you are asking for, and generates the appropriate response.
Early generations might have been limited to fairly simple conversations, but the latest updates from Google can hold multi-lingual conversations, understand complex multipart requests and will soon be even smarter.
As the costs of customer service rise, chatbots provide a quick and easy way to automate the service and provide people with the information they need instantly, with no need to wait on a phone or for the office to open.
Chatbots services like SnatchBot use AI technologies like natural language processing (NLP) to understand what a user types and find the right information, a big step up from conversation scripts which limit the user to just a few options. As AI gets smarter, chatbots will be able to link to all kinds of services and information to provide truly smart responses for our questions.
No wonder they are hugely popular among retailers, health services, airlines, banks, airports and hotels, who have to deal with large numbers of queries every day.
Self-driving cars like the Tesla and the growing range of smart cars are a big collection of AI services managing everything from battery and hybrid systems to the critical self-driving and driver-assistance services. The AI watches what it sees through the camera and makes huge numbers of decisions every second to keep the car and driver, and other road users or pedestrians safe.
With regular updates, the technology is learning all the time and while a high-profile accident may happen from time to time, due to some rare or unfortunate set of circumstances, the safety record is impressive.
These AI issues also helps developers consider the big questions around AI safety, such as just what will the car do when there is no "good option" to avoid an incident. As this AI moves into cargo drones,, trucks, trains, planes and cargo shipping, we all need to know what will happen in the worst case scenario, even while 99.99% of all journies will go perfectly well.
Not all AI is for big in-your-face technology. Banks and other finance-based businesses already use AI to monitor the billions of financial transactions every day to look out for fraud. That could be unusual patterns in stock or currency trades, deposits to accounts, even betting patterns that suggest a sports event is rigged.
The next time your account or is blocked because someone is taking money from it in Croatia or Latin America, thank AI for detecting the fraud.
Shopping recommendations can be a pain, annoying, even embarrassing, but they are getting better thanks to AI. Hopefully, that means in the future you won't see endless streams of adverts for toilet seats or other things you'll only buy the once.
But, AI is also helping with more nuanced selections, such as eclectic movies you might enjoy on Netflix, or a good book from Amazon. AI can also help match shoes to a dress selection, or find the perfect wallpaper or furniture for a room based on a photo that the AI analyses.
