Google and Artificial Intelligence

Recently, I talked to some friends about food and if there was some technology that can recognize a food picture. Not only recognize it as a food but also what kind of food it is. Then, I remembered that Google had launched a camera app called the Lens App that when you open your camera, you can point at various objects or places to tell you what they are and offer reviews. This was released on October 4, 2017.

Image: Google

When I looked it up again, Google Lens has been updated to be a better one. Besides our camera app, Google Lens will also be implemented on Google Assistant and Google Photos. Thus, it can even do a broader type of things.

  1. Recognizing the style of clothing and furniture. If you see a piece of clothing that you like while shopping, Google Lens can identify it and give reviews about similar things. It is also possible to recognize furniture that you found interesting while visiting your friend’s house
  2. Search around us. Google Lens will detect where you are at and shows you the places nearby just by pointing your camera around you.
  3. Another thing Google Lens can do is Smart Text Selection which enables your phone’s camera to highlight a text that is being pointed at and copy it to be used on your phone.

On Google Assistant, there will be an icon at the bottom right-hand corner. If you tap it and point your smartphone camera around, you can get suggestions on the things you point at such as show times outside a cinema. You can see the movie’s details, immediately order a ticket, and even add the event to your calendar. Within Google Photos, Google Lens can identify buildings or landmarks, presenting users with locations, directions, and other information about them.

These functionalities that made finding information much easier have been popular for a long time. Over time, the technology has become a lot more advanced and a lot of people started trying to make it too. There are also other apps that can do similar things such as Bixby Vision for Samsung and Image Analysis Toolset (IAT) (not available in Indonesia). All the things that those apps can do are possible by using the technology of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Currently, AI is one of the most significant technologies that is being researched by many computer scientists.

Google has started to implement AI on many of its software and products. In this area particularly, AI enables the app to learn things and quickly determines or recognizes what is being shown. Google’s vision is to bring the benefits of AI to everyone by helping us solve big and small problems. AI also provides new ways of looking at existing problems, from healthcare issues, environmental issues or even advancing scientific discovery.

Google also has an open-source machine learning platform called TensorFlow. It provides an open-source software library for dataflow programming across a range of tasks using a symbolic math library. Machine learning apps such as neural networks use this. By design, TensorFlow is able to tackle a much wider range of machine learning problems than its predecessor (DistBelief). It allows users to design deep neural networks and run them on a single smartphone or across thousands of computers in data centers.

There are a lot of possibilities of AI use in the future. In some movies, they show that AI can mean the end of the world, ruled by robots. However, I think that’s not the case. It promises a bright new future for us. Despite that AI is still not that smart to be able to understand all the things around us, it is making progress every second. I’m sure that in the near future, AI will have been developed to the point that it changes the way technology works for the good of mankind.

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