5 Uses of AI in Everyday Life
Finally back with my favourite topic, applications of AI. This time I decided to cover the uses of AI in our daily lives. You might be surprised to know that many of our everyday tools use AI to enhance their operations. Here is a video I made summarising five such applications.
5 Uses of AI in Everyday Life
Google Maps
I remember when my dad bought a Garmin GPS in 2008 and at the time it was just a cool gadget that got you to where you needed to be. It wasn't long before we realised that it needed to be frequently updated so that the maps would be up to date and it wasn't always free.
Fast forward to 2021, I like to think that those days are behind us. Today, every smartphone is equipped with Google Maps, arguably the most sophisticated consumer GPS out there. Not only does it frequently update its maps with all the latest street names and buildings but it also uses AI to analyse traffic data and user-reported accidents to make sure you are on the fastest route possible to your destination. More recently in the US it even provides you with an eco-friendly route option routes that ensure that you minimise your co2 emissions.
These days, you can also use live view navigation when you're walking around in the CBD. This feature uses a combination of computer vision, AI street views and conventional maps in order to give you the most helpful navigation advice on your city adventures. These spots are often where GPS tends to perform the worst as the signals bounce off buildings in the densely packed CBD area significantly hampering GPS operation which relies on accurately calculating signal delays to triangulate your position.
Transaction fraud detection
What happens when your credit card details are leaked and suddenly someone in Dubai is using it to buy airline tickets. Well this is something that recently happened to one of my friends.
In 2018, a global total of $27.8 billion were lost as a result of fraud car transactions. Banks are actively using AI techniques to predict fraudulent transactions. They do this by learning your spending pattern by analysing your transaction frequency and transaction amount. For this the most commonly used AI techniques is Random Forest, Decision Trees and neural networks.
Before using AI, simple rule-based algorithms were used. For example, label a transaction as fraudulent if it's $10,000+. As you can imagine this leads to a lot of false positives and a significant amount of manual effort to tweaking these rules every now and then additionally it is not a scalable solution. In this case, AI algorithms prove to be more effective in predicting human behaviour.
Netflix Recommendations
The third use of AI in everyday life is Netflix recommendations. Are you ever lost on what to watch next? Well, open up Netflix and you'll never run out of things to watch.
Once you start binging on your favourite tv shows and movies, the recommendation engine will get to work in finding you more tv shows and movies that you might like by analysing your viewing history, viewer ratings, the time of the day that you like to watch, your shows show category and countless other features Netflix's sophisticated recommendation system is set to generate up to $1 billion in retention value. Netflix also personalises its artwork and thumbnails based on your user engagement.
Emails
We've all gotten one too many spam emails about weight loss pills. If you're a Gmail user then, you'll appreciate the four categories of emails: primary, promotion, social, and updates. While the categories can be a hit or miss I've found that my primary is almost always free of spam but I can't say the same about the social or promotion folders.
Google claims that its AI-powered filtering system stops 99% of spam. The exact filtering algorithm that they use is probably a secret source but it's likely that they use the Naive Bayes filtering algorithm which is a classifier that predicts whether an email is a spam based on its text contents. You might also notice the smart reply feature which analyses your typical replies in order to craft a personalised reply to each email you receive.
Personalised Search
Now the final use of AI in everyday life is the most obvious one. It's to bring you personalised search results. We'll all agree that Google search is second to none. Whilst various AI algorithms power the search engine, Google recently implemented the use of BERT which is a state of the art NLP transformer.
NLP is a field of research dedicated to understanding speech. BERT is a type of NLP algorithm that processes words in context to the rest of the sentence which is very different to the conventional method of processing word one by one in sequence. This enables BERT to better understand the context of what you type into Google search bringing you better-personalised results. So that's five uses of AI in your everyday life.
Learn more about the uses of AI here: 5 Uses of AI Series
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