Write@Home
Winter 2015

Technology

heads up display in self driving car

Although the term “Artificial Intelligence” may sound intimidating or strange to some, it has been used for decades and its applications are more and more common for our daily lives. Nowadays, AI serves us in many areas from answering our questions, help us to organize emails, or even drive the cars for us. One of the most common products of AI is virtual assistant which is built on speech or text recognition. The virtual assistant can listen to us or read our message, understand it, and provide answer. A good example of this application is Fedex virtual assistant, we can call the number or chat with chatbot on the website to get information about your package and get advices if we have problem with our delivery. Another helpful AI usage is email filtering. Google uses AI to ensure that most of the emails land to our inbox are authentic. Google’s AI can ‘read’ the mails subjects, contents, and origins to classify mail to Primary, Social, Promotion and Spam. They claim that their AI prevent 99% of spam from getting in our inbox. Last but not the least, AI now can drive cars for us. What we need to do is let it know where we want to go and then relax. AI enabled car will ‘understand’ the traffic, roads, obstacles, and signs and will bring us to our destination.