AI and Smartphones a Match made in Heaven

Artificial intelligence is penetrating every aspect of our lives, and that includes our smartphones also. They are enhancing the capabilities of our mobile apps and thus enriching our mobile experience.

In this article, we shall explore how AI is improving our mobile experience.

Catering Personalized User Experiences

Imagine a situation; you have just changed cities, and you are exhausted after a long and tiring home shifting routine. You promise yourself a beautiful caffe latte, once you finish shifting your home and putting everything in order in your new place.

You go into a Starbucks into your new city and tell the Barista your name. Voila, the Barista, instantly starts preparing your café latte and cookies because Starbucks knows that this is your favorite order.

It is possible because of the Digital Flywheel program of Starbucks. The Digital flywheel program is a cloud based-Artificial Intelligence system that keeps track of your preferences. The system even suggests you new flavors of Starbucks based on user trends.

Users who have opted for the Starbucks rewards program get this benefit, as they allow Starbucks to gather data about their coffee habits. This includes data such as at what time of the day you usually prefer to drink coffee and which kind of coffee you order.

The Digital Flywheel AI will suggest order recommendations based on the city, weather, and whether it is a weekday or a holiday. The My Starbucks virtual barista on the Starbucks barista app will let you place your orders using voice commands. It will also help you in choosing the best latte according to your taste, apart from recommending the latest flavor in the town.

Apart from Starbucks, brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Nike are utilizing the power of AI to cater to personalized experiences to their users. Now when you enter the website of Tommy Hilfiger, you will be greeted by their chatbot. The Chatbot will not only show you the latest collections of Tommy Hilfiger, but it will also take you behind the scenes of their latest fashion show.

The Chatbot will reply to queries, offer some valuable fashion advice on what to wear for which occasion. The bot can make these suggestions because it analyzes large quantities of data on the fashion preferences of its users worldwide, and also it asks the user a small set of questions that helps the bot in determining the personal style of the user.

Thus AI can help businesses in creating user personas in real-time and in great detail. Now there is no need to segment customers into broad segments; AI will do the job more quickly and efficiently.

Mobile manufacturers are waking up to the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence in mobile devices. An excellent example of this phenomenon would be Apple, which launched the A12 Bionic chip with Neural Engine support.

The chip can perform 5 trillion calculations per second, and Apple has made the chip open to Core ML. This will let the developers utilize the machine learning capabilities of the chip.

Improving the Search Experience

Artificial intelligence has brought about considerable improvement in image recognition systems used in mobiles, improving the overall search experience. This is especially convenient when you see something interesting but do not know what it is, or it is in some foreign language.

Just point your smartphone’s camera, and the search engines armed with AI capabilities will do the legwork for you.

Many startups are implementing AI-based search features in their businesses. Take, for instance, the case of Forever21, which allows its customers to search for their favorite merchandise visually by clicking on the icons which will represent the features that they desire in an outfit.

Similarly, the UAE based Job search platform Bayt.com has leveraged the power of AI by matching job-seekers with job-providers by using an AI algorithm.

AI systems have evolved to such an extent that they can now pair the search terms with the user’s behaviour to give the most relevant results to the user! The AI systems can now identify whether one particular website meets the needs of a user in a better manner than another website or not. Accordingly, it will cater the best results first.

Translate that for me

Travelling to a new country can be fun, but language barriers tend to spoil the party. It's difficult if you cannot read road signs and restaurant menus when on holiday, and this inhibits you from enjoying the local culture in a better manner. But don't worry, our Artificial friends are here to help.

AI systems incorporated into sophisticated language translation apps through voice assistance will let you translate from one language to the other. Earlier, you had to type your query into the app, but now you could speak something in your preferred language, and the app would speak out the same in the desired language, acting as your virtual translator.

AI also adjusts for latency, which means that AI-enabled apps would be able to translate like a human interpreter, without a time lag.

AI-enabled translating apps can also prove to be a boon during medical emergencies. What if the doctor and patient do not speak each other's language?

Don't worry, an app called Canopy has solved this problem. Canopy is a medical translator app that has a vast library of pre-translated medical phrases.

Suppose a doctor who doesn’t speak french comes across a patient who only speaks French, then he/she can ask through canopy some basic phrases. This could prove to be crucial in saving lives.

Chatbots

AI-powered Chatbots are increasingly becoming popular. Chatbots had been invented to ease the load on human customer relations executives. Previously the role of chatbots was limited to answering the FAQs, for anything more than that, you had to contact a human customer relation executive.

But now the scenario has changed, and AI-powered chatbots are now adept in answering complex queries effectively. They do so by engaging with the customer in meaningful conversations and personalizing their responses. Today’s AI chatbots learn from their past conversations with the customer and mold their responses accordingly.

Such smart chatbots help customers by solving their queries effectively and quickly, and they are not affected by mood swings, unlike human customer relations executives.

A classic example of AI chatbots in action would be the Hipmunk chatbot, which is a conversational chatbot used by the company to determine the location of the user and cater tailor-made travel packages according to the needs of the customer.

Hipmunk chatbot uses the power of NLP (Natural Language Processing) to converse with travelers and guide them in booking hotels and flights. The chatbot also asks for any special requests and takes into consideration the personal preferences of the user before going ahead with the booking.

Hipmunk has optimized its chatbot by integrating visual interfaces, buttons, and location tracking features into it. Thus when you type "Flight to NY," the chatbot will give you the flight to New York from your hometown as it knows your location.

Face Detection

With the advent of AI, it is now possible to install reliable face detection systems into our smartphones. These systems enable the app to detect the face with a reliable 98% accuracy. AI-enabled face detection technology is being used to authenticate the identity of passengers in many airports across the world.

Police departments are using the technology for tracking criminals. AI is opening up new frontiers in the field of detection technology; there are softwares, which can identify humans from their gait. This technology identifies people from the angle of their arms and the length of their strides. The Chinese police are already implementing it.

US intelligence department, the Pentagon, is currently trying to develop a technology that will help in identifying individuals by analyzing the way people use their smartphones. This could give rise to a global posturing system as the Pentagon is open to releasing the tech to all the US smartphones once it perfects the technology.

Apart from helping in identifying individuals, this technology will also help in securing your phone. Because if the AI system monitoring your phone recognizes that there are too many anomalies like:- the way you grip your phone, the way you take it out from your pocket, then it will lock the phone automatically. Thus AI will save you from unwanted trespassing in case you lose your phone.

The potential of detection technology is endless; in China, shoppers are using face detection technology to pay their bills.

To wrap things up

By using AI, we can enhance the power of mobile apps. AI systems help your app in identifying patterns of usage and in personalizing the user experience according to the preferences of the user.