AI is Making Your Daily Life Easier without You Realising It
By Christine Robson, Google AI
AI often sounds like some far-off science fiction concept, but it’s actually behind a lot of things you encounter in your daily life. Here’s the rundown: we train a software system with lots of examples so that it can pick up on patterns. Rather than telling the computer that all spam emails contain the phrase “new weight loss trick!”, you train it using millions of examples of spam, and make small corrections until it can pick out the pattern on its own. This ability to learn patterns is called machine learning, a subset of AI.
Without you realising it, AI is indeed making your daily life easier in many ways — read on for 13 of them!
Making Life Easy in a Fun Way
1. Search for “dogs” or “hugs” in your Google Photos library to find your favorite furry friends and (non furry) moments. Even if you haven’t captioned any of your photos, Google can surface the ones that have the object or action you’re looking for.
2. Google Play Music delivers personalised recommendations to play the right music for any moment. By taking into account things like time of day or weather, Play Music can suggest the right music for cooking dinner or watching the sunset.
3. Take a photo in Portrait Mode on Pixel 2 (Google’s smartphones), and it’ll perfectly blur the background of the photo. This system has been trained with almost a million portraits to learn how to pick out the subject of the photo and blur the background.
4. Watch more than one billion YouTube videos with automatic captions, powered by machine learning algorithms that transcribe speech in 10 languages.
Related: Using Artificial Intelligence to Create More Human Experiences
Productivity and Security
5. Quickly respond to an email with Smart Reply in Gmail. Smart Reply saves you time by using AI to suggest three responses based on the email you received. Once you’ve selected one, you can send it immediately or edit your response.
6. And with Nudging, Gmail uses AI to remind you to follow up or respond to messages that are older than two to three days, making sure you don’t drop the ball.
7. Every day, Google Play Protect automatically reviews more than 50 billion apps, and even devices themselves, and takes action when it finds anything suspicious.
Helping You Out in the World
8. Translate text on a sign or menu by holding your camera in front of it. Google Translate uses optical character recognition to figure out the words, and a translation system — which has been trained with millions of examples of existing translations on the web.
9. You can strike up a conversation with your Google Assistant (virtual assistant) in more than a dozen languages.
10. Estimate how hard it’ll be to park your car on Google Maps. It even takes into account parking availability in a given area. Google Maps has learned the patterns of how different parts of a city get busy at different times.
11. Find the right address on Google Maps, thanks to a system that has learned to read street names and addresses from billions of Street View images.
12. Search what you see with Google Lens, whether it’s landmarks, books, artwork, or your neighbour’s dog. It’s possible only with the latest in computer vision — by using machine learning to identify objects and browse the world around you.
13. A smart algorithm in Google Trips can help you plan your next trip. It’s the classic “travelling salesman” research problem, applied to modern transportation and all the complex ways people move around.
Article first appeared on the Google Blog.
Lava is an authorised Cloud Partner of Google and is a reseller of G Suite (previously known as Google Apps, Google Maps for Work, and Google Cloud Platform) in Malaysia. With more than a decade of experience in the industry, we’re proud to say we’re one of the leading cloud consultants and service providers in the Asia Pacific region.