Cognitive App Experiences
- MyKai — The Banking Bot
MyKAI is an AI-powered chatbot to manage your money and track your spending. It is free, and it is built to understand natural conversational language, and to learn about your spending habits and financial goals as you talk to it. This is a cool concept, but the immediate con that comes to mind is security. The company behind MyKai claims that it is very secure because no personal or finaicial data is ever stored.
2. Talla
Talla brands themselves as Employee Support for the Modern Workforce. The web app integrates with work performance apps such as Slack and Microsoft Team platform, and acts as a service assistant that automates answers internal questions from employees, and manages and prioritizes work requests.
3. Seeing AI
Seeing AI is a smartphone app that uses computer vision to describe the world for the visually impaired.Users point their phone’s camera at a person and it’ll say who they are and how they’re feeling. They can also point it at a product and it’ll tell them what it is. It can also scan and read documents, and recognize U.S. currency. This one is Microsoft, which you said to avoid, but I thought this one was a pretty good example and worthy of mention.\
4. DeepArt.io
DeepArt.io is a cool bot that turns any photo you upload into a work of art. Upload a photo, choose an art style (Vincent van Gogh for example), and it will turn your photo into an image that looks like a van Gogh painting. I don’t know if this is really any deeper than auto applying some photoshop type filters, but the idea behind it is pretty cool, and it shows how this type of AI can be applied to the art world.
5. Using AI to fight fake news.
From what I can tell, it doesn’t appear that this idea has been realized in the form of an app or platform just yet, but I did find this article about a professor at West Virginia University that is offering a course for senior level computer science students to create a system that detects fake news articles. The basica approach is to utilize a machine learning system to analyze text and generate a score that represents each article’s likeliness that it is fake news. With all the fake news and misinformation that is thrown about these days, it can be hard for anyone to parse through it all, but with an AI’s ability to process larger amounts of information, this could help people decipher validity within the overwhelming volume of news.
Favorite Brand Experience — Southwest Airlines. With all the airlines seeming to try and find any way the can to gouge customers these days, Southwest is a breath of fresh air. Firstly, they recently rebranded and their new brand identity is top notch. Second, they do things differently than most airlines. They don’t do reserved seating, they dont charge you for extra bags, and they simply have a more relaxed and customer-first attitude than most major airlines. I have been on Southwest flights where the flight attendents sing songs or wish people happy birthday over the loudspeaker. Rather than uphold a stiff corporate culture, they seem to empower their employees to make decisions and put customer service above all else. Here are some additional examples. They even gave free flight vouchers to victims of Hurrican Harvey this weekend. For all these reasons, Southwest Airlines is one of my favorite brand experiences.
