Is this an AI or just an algorithm?

There's a lot of confusion with the term AI. Artificial Intelligence is a fancy word used by marketers to associate products with cutting edge technology, which in most cases is just an algorithm.

So what's the difference between an algorithm and AI

A computer system that works with structured data is an algorithm.

For example, when shopping with Amazon, the algorithm gives you product suggestions based on the history of the previous user's preferences recorded in a structured database.

On the contrary, AI is a system that has the capability of analyzing data as is.

For example, autonomous cars are controlled by Artificial Intelligence.

AI analyzes the current road situation (unstructured data) and gives commands to make relevant reactions (break, accelerate, turn to the left/right).

Natural Language Processing is a communicational AI. A system that can interpret human speech - raw data, that can not be analyzed by a simple computer algorithm.

In general, computers can't analyze raw data. Most living creatures (not to say humans) are better at seeing and examining real-life pictures than the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

On the other side, machines are out of competition at computing, and we all need them to perform our everyday work.

AI combines the best parts of both worlds.

But how you teach computers to analyze unstructured data?

There's where machine learning comes in. ML and human AI-trainer help the computer to interpret raw data into commands.

For example, we are training Calen.ai - our Appointment Marketing Assistant, to understand commands like "book me a call with the doctor" or "check my medical state." Users can request that using hundreds of other phrases. But to make AI understand the command, you don't need to have all possible expressions in the database. Instead, the human AI-trainer adds training phrases to this command (intent) in an NLP application like Dialogflow, and when you have at least 20 of them, ML starts working. It finds all mathematical patterns for those training phrases, like the number of symbols, nouns, spaces, and other parameters. So when the 21st phrase with a similar mathematical model comes in, it understands it as a particular command. The more training phrases you have, the more accurate is the result.

Conversational AI helps your funnel hear what your prospects are saying, and that's an integral part of any sales conversation. 

However, that's not enough to understand what they mean, Because the exact same phrases may have different meanings depending on the context.

How to contextualize and interpret human speech?

That's a topic for another post. Let me know if you'd like to learn more in the comments below.