WHAT ARE SOME OF THE USES OF AI?
Some people have heard about AI and see it as science fiction. AI plays a key role in many people's lives, sometimes without them even realizing it. The uses of AI can cover virtual assistants, website bots, SPAM filters in email, facial recognition, language translation, speech-to-text, customized preferences, predictions, and fraud (Anderson, 2020, Hwang, 2019, ITU News, 2020). AI excels at taking in massive amounts of data, processing it, analyzing it, and deciding what the next steps are. Let's take a look at some of the applications where AI is used to enhance the User Experience.
ON THE INTERNET
AI is heavily used with social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest use AI to manage data, chats, and suggest certain products by way of ads to users. Emilio Ferrara and his associates at the University of Southern California have created an AI application for Twitter to determine real versus face accounts. It uses bots to sense the difference in activity between real and fake users' interactions. They have "analyzed 8.4 million tweets from 3500 confirmed human accounts and 3.4 million tweets from 5000 bots" as reported in 2020 (Lu, 2020; Gillath, 2020). Facebook harnesses the power of AI by using facial recognition with their photo uploads. This technology named Deep Face, uses deep learning which is a subcategory under machine learning. Deep Face uses a "nine-layer artificial neural network (ANN) with more than 120 million connections weights and was trained on 4 million images uploaded by Facebook users" (Kim, 2019a). Facebook uses AI to displays ads geared to the user's interest because they only get paid when a user clicks on the ad so they want to increase the odds that a user will click the link (Hemphill, 2019).
Google uses machine learning in their ad platform to market their ads and a company's apps to certain groups based on their past browsing history. Google also has the capability built into their search engine to increase conversion rates and find more responsive buyers ("Artificial Intelligence", 2018). Google uses AI to display relevant ads within the search results based on what they know about users and what they have viewed in the past. This also ties in to search engine optimization and how sites rank in the search results based on an auction among advertisers striving for a higher place in the list (Hemphill, 2019). Google uses more than 200 pieces of information to anticipate what the user might be looking for. Such information includes search terms, content, region, and page ranking. Google is said to make about 600 updates to its algorithm yearly (De Spiegeleire, Maas, & Sweijs, 2017).
Amazon uses AI to link recommendations to users' searches. When a user clicks on the link and successfully purchases that item that was suggested, Amazon makes money on the suggestion. Amazon uses AI to also forecast demand on products and where they should build their next fulfillment center (Hemphill, 2019).
Some websites with integrated AI can even tell when a user is getting aggravated by the ads or attracted to the ads that they're seeing (Ghosh, Chakraborty, & Law, 2018).
INTERNET OF THINGS (IoT)
AI is just as important in devices connected to the internet. They have the power to harness some of the great features of AI. When integrated into smartphones and tablets, AI can call a ride for the user, make appointments and reservations, play music, communicate with a smart home and turn things on or off, and many more things (Ghosh, Chakraborty, & Law, 2018).
Amazon uses AI in their virtual assistants. Alexa is built into their echo devices as well as some others (Chaudhary, 2019).
Apple's virtual assistant, Siri, is built into phones, tablets, speakers, car navigation systems, and smart watches. It even integrates into smart homes and has the ability to control lighting, heating, garage doors and appliances. A user can initiate, compose, and send texts, make phone calls, set alarms, timers, reminders and calendar events, launch other apps, check the weather, ask for directions, ask questions, translate, and play music. (Chaudhary, 2019; Apple, 2020).
Google has throw their hat into the AI ring as well. They have a virtual assistant called Google Assistant that's integrated into smartphones and tablets. Google Assistant works with Google Home where it can differentiate between six different users and customize interactions with them. At the Google conference in 2018, they demonstrated an AI voice assistant name Duplex. Duplex can make appointments or reservations over the phone to a human on the other end of the line. Google released Google Pixel Buds in 2017 and they perform instant translation via the earbuds using Google Translate. (Chaudhary, 2019; Ghosh, Chakraborty, & Law, 2018; Kim, 2019a).
Microsoft came out with an AI assistant named Cortana that was integrated into the Windows 10 operating system (Chaudhary, 2019).
Samsung added AI to their smartphones with Bixby. A Bixby button is integrated into the phone and conveniently located by the left thumb for easy access (Chaudhary, 2019).
Tesla is a great example of what AI can accomplish. Tesla uses AI to figure out what the road conditions are like, ideal speed, weather conditions, and anticipate other object interaction on the roads based on the car's movement (Radanliev, De Roure, Van Kleek, Santos, & Ani, 2020). Who wouldn't want a self driving car?
DESIGN AND OTHER AREAS
RunwayML, while still in beta, is the do all of machine learning. It integrates with Unity and Photoshop. There are many models to select from including motion capture, object detection, masking, style transfer, text synthesis, and audio generation. It works with images, video, text, and segmentation masks. You can even remove backgrounds automatically from images and videos easily instead of using the painful rotoscoping tool (RunwayML, 2020).