You feel it in your fingers, you feel it in your toes, AI is all around us

Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a technology has reached so many layers of everyday life that it can now be found in almost anything without being aware it is so. Its applications are extremely varied.

From speech recognition and image processing to computer vision and natural language processing.

However, while AI has permeated almost every field related to science and computer programs, there are many hidden artificial intelligence applications that people are not yet fully aware of. It has even infiltrated areas that we wouldn’t expect it to: food, fashion, finance, sports—you name it!

Here you will find some examples showing how AI is now being used in almost every sphere of our lives.

Smart homes and smart living

Smart homes will probably be the first thing you think of when you start looking for artificial intelligence applications. But you have to distinguish the automation tasks performed by electronics and communications from artificial intelligence tasks (supervised, unsupervised or reinforcement learning). I recommend you my article about the topic: Artificial Intelligence - how smart are you?

You can use a daylight sensor properly located to measure the temperature and activate or not the air conditioning by a hysteresis regulator. No need for Artificial Intelligence there, the same applies for opening or closing doors at scheduled times, detect water leaks, by groceries from your smartphone, order food or pay for your food. There is no intelligence involved, that's why the world has been using the pseudonym "smart" instead of "intelligent" for all these actions.

A different thing is when the fridge is provided with inner cameras analysing your food, recognizing the different types and even expiration dates. You can find here some smart refrigerators already in the market. You need intelligence from a system to recognize an object: catch the image of the object, classify the image by comparison with a bank of images (supervised AI) or clustering the images to know how many different images (tyhpes of food) there are (unsupervised AI) in your fridge.

Note that these refrigerators are smart yet, not intelligent. Probably a matter of marketing words, but there is a respect towards the use of the "intelligent" word, since we all sense that this implies something beyond recognition, we expect more of an action.

One thing is recognising your voice, and understand a command, and another thing is having a conversation with a machine the same we would with another human.

In terms of home security, you can now find systems with AI that can interact with your family, friends, and pets. AI-powered systems can recognize your voice, detect your emotions, and even understand your mood. Smart alarms can even recognize your face and let you in while keeping intruders out.

Food recognition and food recommendation

The first time that AI found its way into the culinary world was in the early 2000s, when people started using recommendation engines for different kinds of foods. Now it has gone a step further and created a food recognition application. The application works as an extension of your fridge or as an app that you can use to scan the food you have at home.

It will then recognize the ingredients in your fridge, create a recipe suitable for your fridge contents, and let you know if there are any health benefits from eating that food.

You can also find food recommendation and recognition in other apps, including those that let you order takeout. Just click on a menu item, and the app will recognize the name and ingredients of the food, giving you a complete analysis and letting you know if it is good for you.

Automated Marketing and Advertising

Marketing and advertising have been heavily influenced by artificial intelligence. AI is now being used to create personalized ads that will be more likely to interest you based on your habits, favourite brands, and online behavior. This can range from understanding what content an individual has consumed to what their demographics are.

Advertisers are now using machine learning algorithms to target their ads to specific audiences.

Many companies are now using AI to create their own ads by training computers to recognize images and understand what is being advertised. They can then generate new ads based on the original content, making small changes to the image so that the ad would be different but still recognizable.

Computer Vision: an application we all know

Computer vision is an application that we are all aware of, but we might not have known what it is called. Computer vision (CV) is the ability for computers to understand and interpret images. CV is used in a wide variety of fields, such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, augmented reality, image recognition, and medical imaging.

The biggest application of CV right now is in image tagging. This is the process of labeling images to understand what they are about.

Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest use image tagging to let you know what the image is about. They can also let you know which of your friends have uploaded the same image.

Finance, Robotics, and Self-Driving Cars

Finance and banking seem like they are too important to be quietly invaded by AI. However, now finance, banking, and stock trading have all found their way into the world of AI.

Artificial intelligence is now being used to regulate the global financial markets to prevent fraud and other illegal activities.

Fintech tools use AI and other technologies onto individual portfolios to help you choose stocks and understand their financial value. .

Robotics is another field that has been invaded by AI. You can find robots performing extremely complex tasks, such as surgeries or exploring other planets.

Self-driving cars are one of the most-known applications of artificial intelligence. You can now find cars that can drive themselves. However, these cars are not completely autonomous; they are still controlled by a computer program.

There’s no end to where AI can go, that's why regulation is key

These are just some of the many artificial intelligence applications that you will find in everyday life.

While some of them seem completely trivial, they can truly enhance the way you live.

And this is just the beginning of AI. As more people start using it, the technology will only improve and expand into more areas.

However, while artificial intelligence can be a great thing, it can also be abused, that's why regulations are being developed for the AI massive uptake. A pilot of the first regulatory sandbox on Artificial Intelligence (AI) was presented at the end of June by the government of Spain and the European Commission at an event held in Brussels in the presence of Spanish, European authorities as well as renowned experts in the field.

The regulatory sandbox is a way to connect innovators and regulators and provide a controlled environment for them to cooperate. Such a collaboration between regulators and innovators should facilitates the development, testing and validation of innovative AI systems with a view to ensuring compliance with the requirements of the AI Regulation.