While it seems like we know so much about artificial intelligence (AI) already, we are just tapping into the extensive capabilities of this technology. We often hear about the capabilities that seem almost futuristic to us, such as self-driving cars, but the everyday uses of innovative AI tech are often less apparent.
You might not even know that you’re using AI technology, but anyone who has a smartphone, email account, or mobile bank account uses this every time they operate mobile devices. Here are some popular examples of artificial intelligence that regular people use in their everyday life:
Social Media
This one may seem obvious but each social media platform has a unique AI-driven algorithm that determines what you see on your feed. What you may not know is that some social media sites use a form of AI when you’re uploading photos. Have you ever uploaded a photo and it knows exactly who to tag in the photo? That would be facial recognition technology at work.
Facial recognition technology (FRT) is defined as a biometric software application capable of uniquely identifying or verifying a person by comparing and analyzing patterns based on the person’s facial contours. This means that in just a few moments, this technology is able to detect your face, analyze your face, convert your face into data and then match that data to previously recorded facial data.
So when you upload photos or you’re notified that someone uploaded a photo of you, your face was just analyzed, identified, and matched to other photos of your face all across the internet.
Email Filters
Ever get an email from what you’re positive is a bot and send it to your spam folder? When you do this, you’re engaging with a form of AI called machine learning. Your email provider will often come with its own set of rules-based filters that can kick out very obvious spam emails. Each time you mark an email as spam, you are teaching the email platform’s machine learning AI to recognize future spam emails. This helps a lot when you just can’t seem to unsubscribe from annoying e-commerce site emails.
Customizing your personal spam filter not only helps your email provider further expand its own filter but also keeps your inbox cleaner and easier to manage. On the other hand, going through your spam folder and marking the email you have been looking for weeks as “not spam” can do just the same, so don’t forget to check!
Mobile Check Deposits
Over the last few years, banks across the world have expanded their technological offerings to include mobile check deposits. Through the mobile banking app, you can deposit a signed check right there in just a few minutes without ever having to walk into the bank. All you need is to take a photo of the check and submit it to the app and your money will be deposited.
This technology, known as remote-deposit capture, comes at the hands of AI and machine learning capabilities. When the computer sees the photo of the front of the check, it looks for and analyzes the check number, account number, and routing numbers of the check writer. It then analyzes the back for a signature from the receiving end of the check. After this, the funds are quickly and easily deposited into the bank account of the check receiver almost instantaneously.
While it can be worrisome submitting photos of a check, there are federal regulations in place to ensure the safety and security of your information.
There are many other everyday tools we use that incorporate forms of artificial intelligence into their operation. The knowledge behind this technology is endless and will only continue to be tapped into as the years go on. We now have self-driving cars, what’s next?