Artificial intelligence is a popular subject, and it is easy to get lost in a train of thoughts about big things, such as robots and futuristic ideas. But the reality is that AI is much more present in our daily lives, and we don’t need to go big and think about a robot at a very cool store. It is present in small and simple things.

Some usages of artificial intelligence are very obvious such as digital assistants, and self-driving cars. Others we don’t even think about it, as social media feeds. In this post, we picked 12 areas to talk about AI. This post will be divided into two parts, and in the first part, we will discuss AI applications in the five first topics:

Digital Assistants  

Smartphones  

Email communications  

Web searching  

Social media  

Traffic  

E-commerce, Ads, and Recommendation  

Smart Houses and Home Security  

Games  

Banks and Financial Sector  

Commercial Flights  

Health Care System

1 - How Digital Assistants Use Artificial Intelligence

Siri, Alex, Cortana, and Google Now are digital assistants that help you through your mobile, computer, or speaker, such as Echo Dot. They can check schedules, weather, do an online search, or send a command to another app. In some cases, it can even be connected to smart devices, making home automation possible. You can turn on the lights without getting up from the couch, just by using your voice.

To attend your needs the artificial intelligence powering those assistants, like human assistants, learn from each user interaction. This way, they can better recognize speech patterns and offer results tailored to their users’ preferences. Through machine learning technique, those AI systems learn the nuances of natural human speech, and improve their abilities by each interaction, without the need of being reprogrammed by a human. For example, if a user tells Siri, it has made a mistake, Siri will learn from the interaction, and it will avoid repeating the error.

2 - How Smartphones Use Artificial Intelligence

Before you tell the digital assistant on your phone to execute a command, you need, in many cases, to unlock the mobile. For that, many people use face ID, and this mechanism uses machine learning algorithms to compare the face just scammed with the one it has stored. Even when writing a message using the speech command, we are using artificial intelligence, voice-to-text uses an artificial neural network to power their search. 

Smartphone manufacturers are integrating each day more AI in their products, and artificial intelligence is present even when you use the portrait camera mode. It helps features like scene detection, virtual reality elements, app actions, splices, and adaptive battery, as well as Siri shortcut, and Siri suggestions in iOS 12.

3 - How Emails Providers Use Artificial Intelligence

After our cell phones are in hand, the next step for many of us is to check our emails, and AI plays an important role here too. It starts with our inboxes, email providers (a highlight here for Gmail) use AI to filter the emails you receive to ensure that you are getting authentic content, and categorizes the emails in primary, social, promotions, updates, forums, and spam. Besides that, Gmail also uses artificial intelligence to point out emails that need a reply, reminding you that your attention is required. AI is also in the smart reply feature, which mimics your writing style to send a quick answer.

Spell Check in email and software such as Grammarly use AI and natural language processing to help you avoid writing mistakes. And anti-virus software uses machine learning to protect your email account.

4 - How Search Engines Use Artificial Intelligence

Talking about Google products, you are most likely going to use it or another search engine when you are unsure of something. AI is also present here when you start typing your search, and the search engine gives you recommendations to choose based on your data, such as location, age, and others.

The quality of the search and rank algorithm evolved because artificial intelligence learns from previous search results and adapts to the users’ needs (also because of a lot of human efforts). Artificial intelligence is also used in quality control to deliver the best results, highlighting the best answer on top of the search, followed by a list of sources that answer the question. AI tries to match the users’ search with relevant content, and it also finds and penalizes sites that use questionable practices to be on the top of the search results with poor-quality pages.

5 - How Social Media Use Artificial Intelligence

High is the possibility that after checking your email, you also will see what is going on social media, which uses AI to improve users’ experience. Social media uses artificial intelligence to make it easier for users to find and communicate with people and businesses. It also uses AI to advertise more effectively by writing content and by running massive campaigns and saving resources while creating and distributing those ads.

Facebook uses machine learning to recognize faces in photos and to provide users with personalized content. Snapchat also uses AI to identify faces in the filters and move in sync with them. Pinterest uses artificial intelligence to identify objects in images and match them with similar items.

LinkedIn uses deeper insights into the behavior of applicants to predict who would apply for a job and who would get hired, creating a better match. It also uses AI to give job recommendations and suggest contacts. 

Twitter uses AI to improve users’ experience, in recommendations, and to fight inappropriate or racist content. Deep learning is used to learn users’ preferences.

Instagram uses big data and artificial intelligence to target ads, to fight spam, to enhance users’ experience, and to fight cyberbully. It also uses machine learning to identify the contextual meaning of emoji, enabling Instagram to suggest emojis and emoji hashtags. 

The chatbots, not only on social media, are pure AI. It recognizes words and phrases to deliver helpful content. 

We are constantly using AI in small things in our daily lives, but if you are still not convinced of that, wait for the second part of this post. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and don’t miss it.

This article was written by Juliane Verissímo - Marketing Department of VisionSpace