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Artificial Intelligence is Seeping into Our Lives

Posted by on 02 November 2016
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Once the stuff of science fiction, artificial intelligence
is increasingly becoming part of our everyday. New uses for this futuristic
technology are launched each week, often so subtle that you will only find them
if you seek them out. These practical and specialised AI applications are
helping brands personalise their offering, improve efficiency and simplify
consumers' lives.
The master of the algorithm, Tinder's latest
update
makes it even more likely you'll meet your match. Its Smart
Photos feature will swap your profile picture depending on the preferences of
who is looking at it. For example, it will change if your potential partner
prefers seeing full-length photos, or ones with your pet. The feature is said
to improve over time, but it has already led to a 12% increase in matches.
Ebay also hopes to find you the perfect match ' but with
more of a focus on your home than your love life. Its new Ebay
Collective site
, dedicated to art and design, features image recognition
technology that lets shoppers select an image of a room to find matching
products. Using this tool, the auction site aims for a level of curation that
is ordinarily only found in physical homeware stores.
Despite its benefits, many consumers are understandably
cautious of this rapidly advancing technology. The Hiro Baby app, which
offers on-demand advice and support in response to parental queries, retains a
human-assisted element to reassure apprehensive consumers. Users receive
personalised feedback and product recommendations that are derived through
artificial intelligence, yet approved by a real person before being sent.
Similarly, Baidu's
medical chatbot
is not designed to replace doctors, but simply to
speed up the diagnosis process. Patients answer a series of questions, which
become more personalised with every response, to create a detailed account of
their symptoms prior to doctor referral. These personal assistants use
messaging services to provide a familiar interface that helps connect with
patients individually.
How artificial intelligence will develop in the future is
uncertain. This month President Obama pushed his support for AI, making it a
key focus of his guest edited issue of Wired
magazine
and unveiling a plan for ensuring government regulations
develop in tandem with the technology.
Yet one thing is certain: if artificial intelligence can
deliver the practical benefits it promises, without the distractions, it will
likely be here to stay. As Obama put it, AI 'has been seeping into our lives in
all sorts of ways, and we just don't notice'.
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