How Artificial Intelligence is Influencing Our Daily Lives

The word artificial intelligence (AI) brings the pictures of robots and machines in our mind. Surprisingly AI has already melded as a part and parcel of our daily lives. "Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we will augment our intelligence"- Ginni Rometty. Chairman, President & CEO of IBM. AI has a great influence on human lives and it will dramatically grow in the years to come. The following are the ways in which AI has delved into human lives:

Virtual Personal Assistant

It all starts by saying "Ok Google". All intelligent personal assistants like Siri, Google Now and Cortana are available on various platforms which help to find useful information when we ask with our own voice. Say for example "Remind me to book tickets today" and the assistant will give a quick response by digging more information, relying on existing data on your phone and sending requests to other applications. Artificial intelligence plays a crucial role in retrieving the data and further using the information to deliver best results. For example, Microsoft's Cortana meticulously learns about its users and is able to anticipate their actions. Virtual intelligent assistants can process a huge amount of data from various sources to learn and understand more about the users.

Prediction on Purchase

The e-commerce industry is highly dependent on predicting the purchases by the consumers. Amazon is developing an anticipatory shipping project which forecasts to send the items to the customers. This will completely eliminate the need for a last-minute visit to online stores. On the other hand, offline stores also work in a similar way. When customers visit them, sometimes they are awarded coupons which have been selected in accord with predictive analytics algorithms.

Fraud Detection

We all receive emails or statements regarding the use of our debit/credit card at a specific point of sale.  Most of the banks send these messages to reduce the chances of fraudulence in the account. AI is the technology deployed to monitor fraudulency. In most of the cases, algorithms are given a large sample of fraudulent and non-fraudulent purchases and asked to look for signs that a transaction falls into one category or another. After repetitive processes, systems will be able to spot a fraudulent transaction based on the indicators it had learned through a previous training exercise.

Music and Movie Recommendation

Must have apps like Spotify, Pandora and Netflix push out recommendations to us based on the interest and experiences made in the past. This is made by closely monitoring the choices customers make and then inserting an algorithm helps the apps to provide recommendations. For instance, a song might have "guitar riffs" listed as characteristics; if someone likes that song there is a probability that the same person will like other songs with same characteristics. This is the foundation of recommendation services which helps customers to explore more.

News Generation

AI programs can write about flabbergasting news all around the globe. For example, Yahoo uses AI to write simple financial summaries, sports recap and fantasy sports reports. Automated Insights, the company behind the Wordsmith software suggests that e-commerce, financial services and other data-driven industries are using these applications extensively. So, the concept has been proven, and it's likely that more and more reports will be generated by these means.

Online Customer Support

In many websites, customers are given an opportunity to chat with the customer support representative while they are browsing. In most of the cases, customers will be chatting with a rudimentary AI. Many of these chat support bots providing 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. Basically, chatbots need to adapt to understanding natural language, which is rather a difficult proposition; the way in which customers talk and the way in which computers talk is very different. So, 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 in no time.

Our smartphone, car and bank all use artificial intelligence on a daily basis. Sometimes it's obvious by playing around with google assistant saying "Ok Google". Sometimes it's less obvious, like when you make an abnormal purchase on your credit card and don't get a fraud alert from your bank. AI is everywhere, and it's making a huge difference in our lives every day.

"Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing." – Larry Page