What is Artificial Intelligence? How Does it Function?
What is the first thing that immediately pops up in your mind when you read the term ‘artificial intelligence’? An army of robots taking over the entire humanity? Thanks to pop culture, many people associate AI with sentient machines dominating the planet. However, in reality, technology is assisting people in everyday lives by automating complicated, repetitive tasks. For instance, when people unlock their phones using face recognition technology – that’s AI at work! There are plenty of examples to depict how this technology has impacted our lives. In this blog post, we will try to understand what AI is all about and how it functions.
Why Do We Need Artificial Intelligence in the First Place?
Since almost every aspect of the business is getting digitized, every company deals with data. It becomes humanly impossible to process large volumes of data. This is where artificial intelligence comes into play. Deep learning and artificial neural networks allow researchers to extract valuable information from the heaps of data. Not only does it allow business executives to make better decisions but also make accurate predictions. Moreover, AI processes data much faster than humans. As a result, you can save a lot of time by deploying artificial intelligence for complex tasks. The only concern is that it could be expensive for SMEs to integrate AI.
Weak AI vs Strong AI
These are the two main categories of artificial intelligence. Narrow AI or weak AI is designed for completing specific tasks. Apple’s Siri, virtual personal assistants, and industrial robots are common examples of weak AI. On the other hand, strong AI is programmed to replicate the human brain’s cognitive abilities. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) or strong AI can find solutions to unfamiliar problems using fuzzy logic. Examples are speech recognition, self-driving cars, image recognition, contextual recommendations, and computer programming.
Use Case Examples of Artificial Intelligence
What many people don’t recognize is that the technology they interact with every day is artificial intelligence.
Some examples of AI technologies include:
Recommendation Engines
Don’t you just love Spotify and Netflix? They recommend new TV shows, movies, documentaries and so much more based on your watch history and behavior. Both companies use artificial intelligence for their recommendation engines. Moreover, social media platforms such as Facebook deploy AI to recommend content that you like.
Language Translation
It is one of the most widespread applications of artificial intelligence. Language translation incorporates natural language processing, language detection, and speech recognition to effortlessly display or play messages in different languages.
Spam filters
Spams can be exhausting for anyone to clear every single day. Businesses and individuals are bombarded with spam both in emails and websites. In that case, artificial intelligence has proved to be of great help. Apart from emails, AI is also being used to filter spam phone calls.
Healthcare
Healthcare specialists use artificial intelligence to detect anomalies in medical images. There is always a chance of error when medical imaging is subject to human eyes. AI can detect cancers and tumors accurately and timely thereby potentially saving the patient’s life.
Smart Assistants
Alexa, Siri, Bixby, and other smart assistants utilize speech recognition technology to understand and follow the directions given by users. Besides, these smart assistants have access to search engines that they use for responding to users’ queries. They are more of an upgraded version of chatbots.
Chat Bots
Many companies utilize chatbots on their social media messengers, apps, or websites that are powered by artificial intelligence. They are designed to interact with users and resolve their queries which would not usually require a human customer service agent.