AI is Getting Closer to Us

Artificial Intelligence is no longer Sci-Fi stuff. It has been evolving in so many fronts that will soon come down to our day-to-day routines.

Big companies like Google have been using AI and Machine Learning Systems for a while to analyze complex data, improve recognition algorithms and build personal assistants. However, according to specialized media, AI systems are taking a bigger step and finally getting to the point where anyone can start using it to improve their lives. Let’s take a look at what’s being done and what the near future might bring.

Sophia – The Humanoid Robot

Sophia, a AI humanoid robot developed by Hanson Robotics, is a Saudi Arabian citizen since October 2017. She has shown us some cool features like the ability to maintain a decent conversation, based on questions and answers, and make some “human” expressions, while talking. I was impressed with her answers during the interviews she gave, which made me believe that we are really near to having robots assisting us in some simple tasks.

The market already offers some smart “pocket” solutions, such as Siri or Google Assistant. They keep getting better and today they’re capable of giving users qualified answers to a great variety of questions and help speed some tasks on the smartphone. Unlike other systems, these personal assistants are already an integrated part of our everyday life and they can give us a good idea of what the future will bring.

Huawei Mate 10 Pro

Another thing that really caught my attention was the launch of the new Huawei flagship smartphone, Huawei Mate 10 Pro. This phone is the first one to have the new SoC Kirin970, which is ready to do the AI processing in its NPU, releasing the CPU to other tasks. According to Huawei, the AI will optimize the phone in a lot of aspects, like battery, voice recognition, noise reduction and camera.
The camera will benefit from the AI system since users will be able to take pictures with excellent quality, almost without caring about external conditions.
Besides these optimizations we can see really cool features in the future like this one showed in a demo of the Kirin970 where with the camera we could get the calories, weight and size of food.

Given the speed of evolution of technology in general, the process of embracing AI in our lives and start taking advantage of its great capabilities will be pretty fast. On a side note, we should keep an eye and be careful about the downside of AI, if its power continuous to grow indefinitely, we could face some problems to regain control of the systems using it. But I’ll leave that to a next post