Are we really using Artificial Intelligence in our daily lives?

  The ubiquity of applications of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science is enormous in our daily lives. AI is making our life simpler each moment of the day without us realizing this. In this article, we will go through some aspects of AI which we interact with every day.

Virtual Assistants powered by Speech Recognition & Natural Language

To begin with, only by saying ‘Hello Siri’ or ‘Ok Google’, we are invoking the magic of neural networks. Neural networks used in these virtual assistants enable them to come alive to the sound of ‘Hello Siri’ or ‘Ok Google’ and help us semi-automate mundane tasks like setting the alarm, or finding a restaurant nearby, or checking the weather etc.   Capability to answer such questions like a list of nearby restaurants or the time to drive to your office or news of the day are examples of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The algorithms are trained on a large amount of data to understand the query and generate a suitable response.

Google Photos and it’s magic by virtue of Image recognition

Google photos uses ML and Neural networks to detect faces and backgrounds in the pictures and automatically classifies your images into different groups like people, places, videos etc. Google photos keeps on improving itself by asking you to help map pictures to specific person or location etc. Google photos assistant uses ML to gather pictures with some similarities, for instance,  pictures clicked at a certain place, with certain people or backgrounds, and stitches them together to make collages or videos for you.

Music and Shopping Recommendations

When you create a new Spotify account, the app asks you to select your preferred languages and favourite singers/artists. Then it runs ML in the background to fetch songs and albums based on your interests; and voila you are set to go on a road trip or make your usual office ride melodious. Spotify’s ML and NLP based recommendation system creates a personalised Discovered weekly collection every Monday for all its users.

Similarly, Netflix recommends movies and shows to you based on your likes and ratings given by other people with similar interests as yours. E-commerce websites like Alibaba, Amazon create customized pages for each individual user. All of these online platforms use machine learning to analyse the content of your music or movie interests or shopping habits and perform identification, personalized recommendation, and analysis.

Social media networking

Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram use AI and ML algorithms to provide personalized feed stories, friend suggestions, videos etc. Instagram and Facebook display targeted ads on your page by observing your past activities, likes and clicks. LinkedIn uses ML algorithms to provide right job recommendations to candidates and hiring managers, to connect with professionals with similar backgrounds, and to provide each user with the right kind of feed. LinkedIn uses AI to suggest replies like “Thank you” or “Welcome” to your LinkedIn messages.

Travel and Navigation made easy by AI

The mobility-on-demand services like uber and ola use AI to match a vehicle and find the best route to enable the cab to reach you asap. Carpooling features of cabs use AI to align people travelling on the same route. These apps use AI to tell you the time it will take to reach your destination considering traffic conditions at that time. Surge pricing is also a function of AI (wink wink).   Logistics companies use AI to optimize the shortest routes for quick delivery of products. Google maps use AI (and GPS) to find the best route for you and to deliver the live traffic updates to you.

Search Engines use AI

Search engines like google, bing, yahoo use AI to optimise the search results and give faster responses. Search engines use Natural Language processing and image analysis to understand search queries and find the most relevant information. Google has started using RankBrain which is machine learning-based search engine algorithm from 2015 onwards. RankBrain helps to rank web pages to provide more relevant search results for users.

Smart features in Gmail

Gmail uses AI to classify the incoming emails into primary, social, promotions and spams based on their text content. Gmail suggests smart replies like “Thanks” or “Let’s do It” as per the context of the email and your writing style. Gmail also provides a nudging feature which reminds you to follow up on emails that you have not got any reply for and have forgotten about.

Surprised!!😎

This is the extent to which our lives are simplified by AI (Machine Learning + Natural Language Processing + Ranking Algorithms + Recommendation systems).  And we have not even talked about self-driving cars, chatbots, and robots.     References: https://appletoolbox.com/2016/10/hello-hey-siri-tricks-tips/ https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/30/9416579/spotify-discover-weekly-online-music-curation-interview Share this on


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