Artificial sounds so artificial – shouldn’t that be ‘Incredible’ Intelligence

image courtesy: http://eng-cs.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Artificial-Intelligence01_Web.jpg

Information is wealth and knowledge is power.

Mankind has underscored the importance in its time and today data reigns supreme. Hereon and hence forward, the challenge would be to ‘challenge the supremacy’. With a data now and digital is future, the internet will influence a whopping 50% of purchasing  decisions. In the world in which we inhabit, there is an information avalanche or a data deluge, and what all that amount without application will be just data dump. From core computing to commerce, it’s all about data points. Business is driven by numbers. Message is strengthened with statistics lest it lacks in substance and becomes an opinion. If its fact, then furnish data.

Google, in its inception, was driven by the mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and did anyone gave much thought about its ability to market and monetize back in the late nineties. There were many search engines at that point in time that have disappeared or probably obscured by the numero uno status held by Google today. Websites apportioning real estate for advertisements to milk money as a strategic revenue stream didn’t hold weight for all despite their might. Publishers started studying traffic and the one that gained more traction in terms of attention and active participation proved pivotal in assessing return on income.

This report acknowledges Mary Meeker’s 2016 internet trends as key inputs to arrive at different inferences and interpretations.

Some highlights from the presentation more pertinent to this passage:

• Internet advertising in the US has grown by about 20% since last year, reaching $60 billion—two-thirds of that growth has come from an increase in spending on mobile ads.
• Facebook’s yearly advertising revenue (up 59%) grew much more than Google’s (18%) last year.
• Online video ads are ineffective: 81% of people surveyed mute video ads, 62% are annoyed by pre-roll ads, and 92% have considered using ad-blocking software.
• Internet sales have increased from less than 2% of all retail sales in the US in 2000 to about 10% in 2015.
• The rising Snapchat generation: Millennials communicate with text, but Generation Z prefers to communicate with images.
• The average Snapchat user plays with sponsored lenses for 20 seconds.
• There are now over 3 billion images shared daily between Snapchat, Facebook, Facebook 
• Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp—all but one of which are owned by Facebook.
• 55% of Pinterest users use the site to find products they want to buy.
• Messaging apps are moving from simple text tools to communicate with friends to platforms for commerce.
• There are 10 million business accounts on WeChat, and about 80% of all users follow one.
• Generation Y is the first generation to prefer chatting over the web or social media to talk to businesses, rather than over the phone.
• Computer recognition of speech has gone from about 70% to 90% accuracy in the last five years.
• 65% of US smartphone owners now use a voice assistant.
• By 2020, at least 50% of all searches online will be through voice or image search, according to Baidu’s chief scientist Andrew Ng.
• It’s time for self-driving cars: The average urban US worker spends about 42 hours a year sitting in delays on their commute, and the average person’s car is only in use about 4% of the time.

1.   Intelligence driving computers is not something we stumbled upon. It was a given. ‘Search’ engine started with a search by returning results that’s near about or no way near to the ‘search input’ and a distant to the expected ‘result’. Then search engine pushed it way and propelled itself to the way forward, by retrieving ‘right’ result with minimal iteration. You don’t have to be brainy or super smart to string a nice ‘search query’ – the system should be able to fetch you the search ‘result’. How did it do it? Intelligence reared its head up – defying logic, reason and rationale. Over time, Google has amassed a wealth of information to mine and monetize – using Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.

artificial intelligence like voice interaction, personal assistants and automation take center stage.

With advancement, where we did we witness the acceleration of intelligence? Try the search engine. The accuracy in the search results has gone exceedingly high and to the cycle or attempts taken to locate the result has reduced way below. The machines are able to recognize through images and words used. How? Check the newsfeed in Google news section. Or observe the image results. Or the X-Box that feeds body movements as inputs to read and respond. Personalization is not the pinnacle of AI. It’s just warming up.

Next cars will drive and diagnosis can be more specific. We see more players actively engaged in AI as direct line or dotted. Ford is not a player in AI but its investment in AI for its vehicles has risen manifold. Google came out with ‘allo’ and Facebook launched ‘DeepText’ and startups mushrooming by the hundreds in this space.

The Trends 2016 put forth by Meeker

Search Engine

Try hailing a cab from your office corridor or the home confines, and check your device with the app and study the screen up close. The GPS fueled intelligence is just compelling or at times, breathtaking by the sheer spectacle of the number of vehicles traced and screened in the smart device with the possible time to reach in minutes. Perhaps the details complemented with depiction dazzles. This is a common and known scenario that happens in our daily walk of life.

Now Google is a well-known search engine. Facebook, given its information capital wants to leverage and launched DeepText for better engagement. The conundrum with regard to privacy is an admittedly complex. It’s the ground breaking development that’s fascinating. Google search and DeepText have ‘search’ as common and still exist as chalk and cheese as the domain is different for both.

AI-driven messaging Apps

Microsoft has one - ‘Skype, while Facebook has two:  “whatsapp and messenger” and Google joins with its own AI-based app “allo”. The apps have built-in ability to enhance and enrich user experience. AI enabled assistants have been in the news lately with one or the other behemoth rolling out their product. Times have witnessed the launch from Google, Facebook, apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and even as this article is penned, the buzz in the industry is Robot Betty joins office as a trainee office manager.  One wonders with this evolution of Artificial Intelligence and the looming threat of people’ interest superseded by machines introduction into the workforce – cases as in chatbots which can automate repetitive mundane handled by humans cutting on the cost and drastically enhancing the productivity.  

Image Recognition and Voice Software

The advancement is alarming that machine can think like man, act independently and intelligent enough to communicate to another robot.   Google image recognition can be amazing study and awe-inspiring in its implementation. Powerful algorithms can read from millions of pictures and map with the face scanned by the camera and throw a result – the identification is another break ground in terms of innovation, especially the high-level abstraction in data and multiple processing can be mind boggling.

Voice-function enabled search is another incredible innovation. We had voice software but enabling search with voice is so powerful in its enablement. You speak faster than read or type. So the ease and comfort with which the user is empowered is unbelievable till you do the search yourself. For instance, if it’s an android phone, you can experiment by simply asking “Ok Google, what is the temperature outside” and within second you hear the answer. Try any other question but make sure your question starts with “ok Google’ because the system understands this command. The voice and image have undergone incremental changes to arrive where they are at present. The voice recognition when complemented with image and retina can become dominant in determining user identification.

Summing up, the progress of AI is exponential that it entwines in our daily life. As we resort to AI for almost anything – reminders, communication, travel, sports, entertainment and what not, even the skeptics will forced to look harder and question their own beliefs.

It’s no longer the distant future.