Artificial intelligence in action
Machine Minds
With the past decade on its way out, making room for the twenty twenties, we’ve been looking back over the last ten years. It’s fairly safe to say Artificial Intelligence has been a headlining star, spending plenty of time in the spotlight.
The advancements made in AI have been abundant, and with them its potential has soared. The bottom line is that AI is a fantastic innovation which can render even complex tasks effortless and hassle free with vastly diminished room for error
The applications of this technology are numerous, spanning across industries, corporate and consumer alike. Here are a few examples of where AI is already being used effectively in the world today.
Everyday life
The population at large often find themselves interacting with artificial intelligence, often possibly without even realising it.
An obvious example is the explosion of virtual assistants internationally. Existing on phones, tablets and hubs alike, these disembodied AI voices respond to spoken instruction and help us manage our day to day lives. Keeping track of our calendar, interacting with social media, and, through the Internet of Things, maintaining other devices across our ‘smart’ homes. The artificial intelligence has been taught to interpret spoken language and act upon user requests for a swift and hands-free interface.
A more subtle AI presence most people come into contact with is predictive text. We’re all likely familiar with the suggested word bar above our touch screen keyboard which offers options for the next word in a sentence. Present on all modern smart phones, predictive text analyses your writing habits, learning to interpret your words and tagging language structure and vocabulary based on context. Using this gathered data, the AI can construct an algorithm which predicts your text patterns. In conversations with friends it will recommend slang terms, in professional discussions, correct your grammar, while providing an autofill feature to speed up the rate at which you compose your messages.
Medicine
The medical world has no end of applications for AI. Through machine learning, AI can be taught to inspect and interpret visual data. Using this functionality provides medical practitioners a means to achieve high precision analysis of medical images such as x-rays and MRI scans in a narrow window of time. This enables a much faster diagnostic process.
Diagnosis and prognosis themselves can also be streamlined with an artificial intelligence solution. When diagnosing a patient, doctors must refer to information held in untold archives and libraries of medical journals, encyclopaedias and case studies. The volume of data is vast, with countless rare and unusual cases, and myriad branches of symptoms. A methodical digital system with access to these resources, provided with a patient’s specific condition, could swiftly return possible diagnoses to a practitioner to consider, without risk of overlooking key details.
Business
No company is working to it’s full potential without artificial intelligence taking off some of the strain. With its powerful problem-solving capacity, an AI can enormously reduce a business’ workload and magnify productivity. Through computer-perfect logical deduction and comprehensive analysis, smart software will return to a user readouts and suggestions to overcome bottlenecks and optimise their business model. Good decision making is never easier than with an AI dynamically providing you all the relevant information.
Furthermore, they can do more than simply assist an end user intellectually, but entirely takeover certain tasks. Until the “theory of the mind” in artificial intelligence research is achieved, there are some things which a computer simply can’t do, that a human can. However, what they can do, they can do far better. By automating intermediate procedures, a business can make better use of its employees’ time, unhampered as they would be by the minutia, and achieve a rapid and efficient workflow whilst simultaneously eliminating human error.
Finance
AI plays a huge role in finance, particularly in the stock market. With nigh instant reactions and superhuman precision in data analysis, an artificial intelligence powered system can make millions of trades daily, based on an accurate assessment of the live market. The software constructs scientific models and algorithms combining live and historic data sets to make cogent transactions. With constantly rising and sinking prices on stock options, this digital alternative to manual trading ensures maximum efficiency of profits.
Another application of this swift autonomous analysis is data mining. By the same process of neural networks employing deep learning to interpret the market and generate projections, an AI can predict the future market and advise human investors on the right place to keep their money. A longer-term solution, this process offers a far more reliable forecast than a human could capably produce.
Consumer Services
Direct to consumer services have a range of AI tools available which streamline their customer interaction and deliver a higher rate of customer satisfaction. For example, product recommendation, a concept most people will be familiar with. When using an online vendor, users will often be prompted with alternative products which may interest them. These prompts keep consumers on the platform and promote the company’s goods to likely interested parties, raising sales. An artificial intelligence is responsible for offering these suggestions, curating a network of associations based on data tags. It does so by examining both the user’s purchase history and the purchase history of other users shopping for similar goods.
Many online retailers also use chat bots. A process called Natural Language Processing allows the chat bot to learn as it goes, correlating context and content with every user to build up a structured model which allows it to interpret written language. By applying this model to its built in vocabulary, it is able to coherently communicate with a human user, providing around the clock customer service.
And Much More
These examples are all veritable uses of the revolutionary technology powering artificial intelligence, but they are but the tip of a mighty ice berg. Civilisation will progress exponentially with smart software systems driving it forward. The same could be true of your business. To find out how AI tools can be applied to your project, contact Shoothill – the software specialists.