The current thought is that artificial intelligence (AI) will either revolutionize every industry or become smarter than people and drive us out of existence. 

The real answer is no one knows, but we do know that AI is affecting us. Language processing, speech and facial recognition, self-driving cars, and evolving machine intelligence are but several of the ways AI is impacting human society.

In current usage, AI refers to either a computer that can learn from experience and improve its performance over time, or a computer that can recognize voice and other ‘natural’ human inputs and respond in a useful way.

Products, such as ECHO, Siri and Alexa are already acclimating consumers to interacting in a familiar way with very powerful, evolving machine intelligence.  For example, your ECHO knows that every morning at 6 am you wake and turn on a light. That habit can be replicated by ECHO and be automated each morning. It’s all about perfecting the experience and baking-in that intelligence and creating systems that will know what users want and when they want it.

Artificial Intelligence — Reaction Aware

Another area in development is what is termed ‘reaction aware’ or emotion-sensing AI systems which use up to 40 billion data points combined with deep machine learning and advanced computer vision technologies to sense and analyze feeling.

Powerful AI is very expensive to develop and deploy, requiring huge amounts of coding, powerful processors, and very high bandwidth to make work. So, for now, the best AI goes into cars, smartphones, banking, healthcare, and digital signage. A limiting factor to AI’s growth is the tremendous amount of data that systems must gather and process in order to develop deep intelligence about the real world – in time this impediment will be overcome.

AI’s immersive, man/machine collaborative environment might seem uncomfortable but it will shape our future. Robotic factories are already making better robots for manufacturing cars. Future AI will surely impact humanity in ways that we can not imagine. In the best case scenario AI will contribute to a win-win world, but don’t be so sure.

Search Engine Optimization for Voice

What does this mean for your company’s marketing? You want to be found when someone is searching for what you have to offer, right? That means optimizing your website, social media, marketing and advertising for voice search. For instance, on a mobile device, someone may ask for “plumber near me”. Google will take the phone’s GPS and bring up the 3 closests plumbers. Depending on how much competition you have and how well you are optimized for search, will determine if you come up in those coveted top spots.