Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and NLP

Emerging trends are new, state-of-the-art technologies that are quickly becoming popular and changing how we live and work.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tries to give machines human-like intelligence: the ability to learn, make decisions and solve problems. You meet it every day: a map app finding the fastest route, a photo app auto-tagging your friends, face unlock on your phone, the videos YouTube or Netflix recommends, and voice assistants like Siri, Alexa and Cortana. AI is also used in dangerous places where people cannot safely go: space missions, disaster zones, bomb disposal.

An AI system uses a knowledge base: a store of facts, assumptions and rules. It also learns from the results of its past decisions, so it gets better with experience.

Machine Learning (ML) is a part of AI. Computers learn from data, using statistical techniques, without a person writing every rule. An ML model is first trained on training data, then tested on separate testing data to check its accuracy, and finally used to make predictions on new data. If you watch comedy videos one day and science videos the next, a video app's ML model learns your interests and suggests more of both.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) lets people and computers communicate in human languages such as Hindi and English. Examples: predictive typing (your phone suggesting the next word), spell check, voice search, text-to-speech and speech-to-text, machine translation (one language into another), and automated customer service (chatbots).