You may not know this but you are using AI on a regular basis in your day to day life. Whether it is while going to work, using your phone, browsing through the net, etc. you are using AI in all of them to some extent. Here, we discuss some applications of AI in daily life.

 

What are AI and Machine Learning?

AI or Artificial Intelligence refers to the development of computer systems which can process information like humans, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision making and translation between languages.

Machine learning is a field of AI that uses techniques to give computer systems the ability to learn from large amounts of data without being explicitly programmed. For example, to teach a system to identify an object from an image, it is given a huge number of positive samples which contain the object from different angles and an even bigger number of negative samples to identify unwanted parts of an image.

 

AI Applications in Daily Life

Uber Ride Sharing

Whenever you hire a ride through Uber, how does it decide which is the nearest ride for you, the price for your ride, the least detour it needs to take for sharing with another customer? The answer to all above questions is machine learning. They implement algorithms which continuously learn from different rides and journeys. It also helps map the shortest routes.

 

Google Maps Traffic Predictions

Another example is Google Maps which use location data from smartphones to determine the speed of traffic in any given area. Recently, it acquired Waze which helps to include user-reported traffic incidents like construction and accidents. By using different sources of data, the algorithm can determine the fastest route from one place to another.

 

AI Pilots in Commercial Flights

This is actually an old application of AI. The actual time for a human steered flight is only during take-off, landing and turbulence. The rest of the time, autopilot steers the plane on a pre-planned flight course.

 

Email

Machine learning algorithms are used extensively in email services to filter out spam messages. Spam filters need to continuously learn from different kinds of messages. Simple phrase filters will not work as spammers will easily find a way around it by rephrasing.

Another application is Gmail’s mail categorization. Every time you mark an email as important, Gmail learns from it. Next time, it will automatically prioritize an email sent from the same email id. In 2015, Gmail launched a facility for smart reply where you can send pre-drafted messages as replies.

 

Banking / Finance Sector

AI helps to deposit mobile cheque by identifying the signature on the cheque. It also helps to identify fraudulent transactions by utilising neural networks. Neural networks are systems which function similar to a human brain. They are trained through machine learning. Some of the factors which affect transaction authenticity are transaction frequency, transaction size, etc. Machine learning algorithms are also responsible for calculating the credit score for a person.

 

Social Networking

Social networking is one of the most common applications of AI in daily life. When you upload a picture to Facebook, it automatically highlights the faces of your friends. How does it know them? It uses facial recognition software which is developed on artificial neural networks to recognize faces. AI is also used to display a personalised newsfeed so that you only see posts that you are actually interested in. Targeted ads are another area where they apply AI. Facebook accounts for 20% of the global online marketplace of $203 billion (source: businessinsider.com).

Facebook has built “DeepText”, “a deep learning-based text understanding engine that can understand with near-human accuracy the textual content of several thousand posts per second, spanning more than 20 languages” (source: code.fb.com). In short, it will be able to identify the gist of a post or intent of a message and act accordingly like sharing the post to interested users or hailing a taxi for a user who wrote: “I need a ride” on Messenger.

Pinterest uses computer vision. It is an application of AI where computers are taught to “see” so that they can identify objects in an image. These systems can then search for similar objects in other images and recommend them as “pins”. Other applications include spam prevention, search and discovery, ad performance and monetization, email marketing,etc.

Snapchat introduced facial filters which can add effects to a face or digital masks which move with the face in a video. It uses machine learning which can track movements in a video to implement this feature.

 

YouTube

YouTube team has launched an improved automatic YouTube “thumbnailer” to help creators showcase their video content. This thumbnailer has learned through deep neural networks so that it can identify best frames in a video. It uses AI to produce automatically generated captions in a video in different languages. It also helps identify copyright content. The company uses deep neural networks. These are trained against billions of data points of viewing behaviour. The training allows them to give better video recommendations.

 

Other Applications

Amazon uses AI to combine relevant features for any searched product and recommend them to the customers. The algorithm also helps prevent fraudulent transactions and false declines.

Mobile phone assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, etc. are applications of AI.  They are designed to help you by setting reminders, performing scheduled tasks like sending emails, ordering products online, etc. Chatbots which answer your queries on websites is also an application of AI.

The future of driving, known as driverless cars, will also implement AI and machine learning algorithms in order to drive automatically. These cars will not require any human intervention whatsoever.

 

 

Conclusion

We have barely scratched the surface in this article about different applications of AI in daily life. There are much more complex applications of AI available in different fields such as robotics, manufacturing plants, etc. Artificial Intelligence is a vast field with limitless possibilities. In future, AI will be deeply integrated into our lives.

 

Tags: AI applications, AI applications in daily life, daily applications of AI