Artificial intelligence: six daily uses

In popular culture, artificial intelligence has long been synonymous with robots autonomous which, either in the catastrophe version, would come to annihilate the human being, or, in the humanist version, would come to relieve him of thankless tasks. If this latest futuristic idea begins to materialize in the form of self-driving cars or of robot vacuum cleaners or other mowers, artificial intelligence has already largely invaded our lives.

Emails

Emails rely heavily on artificial intelligence to optimize their operation and improve the user experience. Spam filters benefit greatly from AI, which can process large amounts of messages and detect new ones very quickly Spam flooding inboxes.

For his email GmailGoogle uses Tensor Flow, one of the most advanced AIs that manages to block more than 99.9% of spam. The Web giant does not stop there, and offers other AI-based functions. Its Smart Reply feature offers short messages so you can reply to an email with just one click. The firm has also developed a function called Smart Compose, capable of finishing the user’s sentences.

Social networks

Artificial intelligence greatly influences the way information is presented, especially on social networks. For example, Facebook sorts publications from contacts and followed pages, then filters them to highlight those deemed most important, while completely hiding the others. The site uses an AI called DeepText to analyze the content of the publications which is not only used to organize the news feed, but also allows to involve a human employee if it detects suicidal signs.

Search engines

Search engines could hardly function without artificial intelligence, given the colossal size of the web. AI is deployed in the form of robots that crawl sites to index them, but also to rank them and determine the order of presentation according to search terms.

It even allows you to customize the results according to the type of search: display the weather report, the distribution of a film, or perform calculations or currency conversions. Google also offers its Google Suggest function, the predictive search that is displayed while typing the querywhich attempts to guess the search based on its indexing, frequent searches, and user history.

The translation

Machine translation services, accessible via services like Google Translate, or directly integrated into sites like Facebook, have made great progress in recent years, to the point of producing perfectly understandable texts. This progress was made possible in particular thanks to the techniques of deep learningas with Google’s AI called Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT).

Merchant sites

AI is also playing an increasingly important role for online sales sites. It suggests new articles to consult based on the user’s history, as well as the navigation of other visitors. Sorting centers, for the preparation of goods, are also managed by AI with the growing use of robots which, in an incessant ballet, transport products from one station to another.

Navigation apps

Artificial intelligence has changed our traffic habits, thanks to apps navigation like Waze or Google Maps. These determine the shortest route and estimate the arrival time. They can even take real-time traffic into account to automatically modify the trajectory to avoid traffic jams.