Applications of AI
Now that we know how information gets processed, let's see where AI appears in the real world. AI manifests itself in various different forms across multiple fields, so it's important to understand how it's useful in various domains. AI has been used across many industries and it continues to expand rapidly. Some of the most popular areas include:
- Computer Vision: These are the systems that deal with visual data such as images and videos. These systems understand the content and extract insights based on the use case. For example, Google uses reverse image search to search for visually similar images across the Web.
- Natural Language Processing: This field deals with understanding text. We can interact with a machine by typing natural language sentences. Search engines use this extensively to deliver the right search results.
- Speech Recognition: These systems are capable of hearing and understanding spoken words. For example, there are intelligent personal assistants on our smartphones that can understand what we are saying and give relevant information or perform an action based on that.
- Expert Systems: These systems use AI techniques to provide advice or make decisions. They usually use databases of expert knowledge areas such as finance, medicine, marketing, and so on to give advice about what to do next. Let's see what an expert system looks like and how it interacts with the user:
- Games: AI is used extensively in the gaming industry. It is used to design intelligent agents that can compete with humans. For example, AlphaGo is a computer program that can play the strategy game Go. It is also used in designing many other types of games where we expect the computer to behave intelligently.
- Robotics: Robotic systems actually combine many concepts in AI. These systems are able to perform many different tasks. Depending on the situation, robots have sensors and actuators that can do different things. These sensors can see things in front of them and measure the temperature, heat, movements, and so on. They have processors on board that compute various things in real time. They are also capable of adapting to the new environments.
