Internally Facebook and others are using artificial intelligence to help drive countless decommissioned services: providing search results, offering suggestions, recognising people and things in photos, on-Demand Translation, detecting spam.
But one of the most visible manifestations of this AI War has been the rise of virtual assistants such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft's Cortana.
A huge amount of Labor and money is being spent developing these assistants, which rely heavily on voice recognition and natural language processing and require enormous integrity to answer queries.
But while Apple's Siri may have stood out first, it is Google and Amazon who, with their assistants, have since overtaken Apple in the field of artificial intelligence.Its capabilities are Google Now with answering a wide range of questions and Amazon's Alexa with a large number of 'skills'.With the time that third-party developers have created to add to their abilities, these assistants have given them abilities that make them more responsive and allow them to better handle the types of questions people ask in regular conversations. For example, Google Now offers a feature called continuous conversation; this feature allows a user to ask their first query, 'how's the weather today?'and then 'what happens tomorrow? it offers a feature where you can ask follow-up questions such as', and the system understands that the following question is also related to the weather.
These assistants and related services can do much more than talk to the latest incarnation of Google Lens, which can translate texts into pictures and allow you to search clothes or furniture using photos.
Despite being built into Windows 10, Cortana has had a particularly hard time, and Amazon's Alexa is now available for free on Windows 10 PCs. At the same time, Microsoft renewed Cortana's role in the operating system to focus more on productivity tasks such as managing the user's program, rather than the more consumer-oriented features found in other assistants, such as playing music.
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