Artificial intelligence: what is it and what are its applications?

For some time now, artificial intelligence has been widely discussed around the world. For many lay people, it is still fiction, and it only exists in movies and TV series. But for researchers, business managers and market observers, artificial intelligence is already a reality. The fact is that, today, it is being used by organizations from various industries, for different purposes.

Next, we'll show you what exactly artificial intelligence is and how it's currently being used. Be sure to check:

The concept of artificial intelligence

For John McCarthy, professor of computer science at Stanford University, artificial intelligence (AI) is the science of making intelligent machines. These machines must be able to reason like a human being, solve problems and improve themselves. That is, to do things that are normally done by people – especially things that require intelligence.

Artificial intelligence research began shortly after World War II, when large numbers of people began to develop intelligent machines. Perhaps the first was the English mathematician Alan Turing, who also created the 'Turing Test', which aims to discover whether or not a machine is endowed with artificial intelligence, and whether or not it can think like a human being.

AI applications today

Today, artificial intelligence is used in:

• Voice recognition systems, to allow people to order food, call a taxi or access their bank account through mobile devices using their own voice, without having to type or click;
• Call center systems, to allow consumers to request some information related to their account using their voice and get a realistic response from a virtual attendant;
• User identity verification systems, to compare the live image of a person, through a camera, with a reference image stored in a database;
• Emotion detection systems, to analyze whether people are happy or sad based on facial images captured live by cameras.

AWS Solutions for Artificial Intelligence

At AWS re:Invent 2016, Amazon Web Services announced a number of new services, including some focused on artificial intelligence. Meet them:

Amazon Lex

Amazon Lex is a service for creating conversational interfaces for applications. It offers advanced automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding capabilities, so developers can build applications that deliver highly engaging user experiences and very realistic interactions.

Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. It offers 47 male and female human voices in 24 languages, allowing developers to select the most ideal one for their project and implement it in their application, so that it 'speaks' to people from many different countries, speaking different languages.

Amazon Rekognition

Amazon Rekognition is a service that allows developers to add advanced image analysis capabilities to their applications. In addition to detecting objects, phases and scenes in images captured by cameras, this feature also identifies people's emotions, such as happiness and sadness.

And you, what do you think about artificial intelligence? Do you think it can revolutionize the world and the corporate universe? Leave your opinion in the comments! [:]