Artificial Intelligence is often overlooked as being a general-purpose application technology that already inhabits many aspects of our lives. Not to mention the prophecies about the ‘future’ of AI, Skynet-inspired stories and doomsday divinations. But what about the way in which AI has improved existing technologies?
Let’s take a look at how Artificial Intelligence impacts our daily lives:
Intelligent Personal Assistants
Whether you’re wanting to find directions to the nearest cafe or settle a debate, Siri, Cortana and Alexa (among others), have your back. Intelligent personal assistants are at your disposal. They use location data, user input and a variety of database information to carry out requests from both voice command and text. Did you know there are over 2 billion Smartphone users worldwide according to Statista? It’s clear this technology has revolutionised how we navigate our daily lives. They’re rapidly improving, and putting an end to pub debates all over the world!
AI Streaming Recommendations
Thanks to apps like Netflix and Spotify, you will never have to deliberate over what to watch or listen to again. By monitoring your viewing history, recommender systems are able to make personalised suggestions. You see, AI identifies patterns from trained deep learning algorithms. As the data sets grow, streaming recommendations are only getting increasingly more powerful.
Customer Service Automation
Call routing with voice recognition software is now commonplace for many call centres. Previously, this technology has had a bad rep, but advances in Natural Language Processing have improved the quality of this over time. This has meant that many companies are now able to use chatbots. For instance, they are able to assist customers on live chat rather than human customer service agents.
AI Fraud Prevention
Often times, AI is behind the emails or letters you receive after completing transactions on your credit card. Programs detect changes out of the ordinary through purchase patterns and location data. As a result, this prevents fraudulent purchases from happening. The deep learning algorithm takes on data sets of fraudulent and non-fraudulent activities. This trains the algorithm, learning tell-tale signs of these purchasing activities.
Home Heating
A few years ago, Google acquired Nest for a cool $3.2 billion. Built on a machine learning algorithm, Nest has the Alexa voice-control feature. Upon initial set-up, Nest stores your daily schedule data. This stored data allows Nest to learn your habits and behaviours through location tracking and sensor technology. Not only does this AI make our lives that little bit more comfortable, but it’s environmentally sound.
Of course, these are just a few examples. There are many other ways in which AI technologies support the functioning of your day to day life.
