While the technology is evolving—quickly—along with fears and excitement, terms such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning may leave you perplexed. I hope that the following 8 practical examples will help to clarify the actual use of deep learning technology today.
1. Virtual assistants
Whether it’s Alexa or Siri or Cortana, the virtual assistants of online service providers use deep learning to help understand your speech and the language humans use when they interact with them.
2. Translations
In a similar way, deep learning algorithms can automatically translate between languages. This can be powerful for travellers, business people and those in government.
3. Vision for driverless delivery trucks, drones and autonomous cars
The way an autonomous vehicle understands the realities of the road and how to respond to them whether it’s a stop sign, a ball in the street or another vehicle is through deep learning algorithms. The more data the algorithms receive, the better they are able to act human-like in their information processing—knowing a stop sign covered with snow is still a stop sign.
4. Chatbots and service bots
Chatbots and service bots that provide customer service for a lot of companies are able to respond in an intelligent and helpful way to an increasing amount of auditory and text questions thanks to deep learning.
5. Image colorization
Transforming black-and-white images into colour was formerly a task done meticulously by human hand. Today, deep learning algorithms are able to use the context and objects in the images to colour them to basically recreate the black-and-white image in colour. The results are impressive and accurate.
6. Facial recognition
Deep learning is being used for facial recognition not only for security purposes but for tagging people on Facebook posts and we might be able to pay for items in a store just by using our faces in the near future. The challenges for deep-learning algorithms for facial recognition is knowing it’s the same person even when they have changed hairstyles, grown or shaved off a beard or if the image taken is poor due to bad lighting or an obstruction.
7. Medicine and pharmaceuticals
From disease and tumour diagnoses to personalised medicines created specifically for an individual’s genome, deep learning in the medical field has the attention of many of the largest pharmaceutical and medical companies.
8. Personalised shopping and entertainment
Ever wonder how Netflix comes up with suggestions for what you should watch next? Or where Amazon comes up with ideas for what you should buy next and those suggestions are exactly what you need but just never knew it before? Yep, it’s deep-learning algorithms at work.
The more experience deep-learning algorithms get, the better they become. It should be an extraordinary few years as the technology continues to mature.
From Bernard Marr & Co. and Forbes (edited)
