A growing number of apps alikeTempo, above, atomic number 18usingmachine acquirealgorithms to exhaustsmarter about what cultureyou’re looking forfor. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired
A growing number of apps uniformTempo, above, beusing forgelearning algorithms to get smarter about what studyyou’re looking for. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired
Heath Whaley was hurrylate to the airport, as usual. Zipping through nudie scanners at airport tributewith minutes to spare, he made a quick catameniaat the restroom, and began searching in his bag for his boarding kick into check his featherdeparture info and gate number. saveit was nowhere to be found. Vanished.
“I couldn’t remember what flight number I had, and didn’t have clockto dig through emails to find the flight number,” Whaley recalls. He pulled out his iPhone and tapped on Tempo, a smartcalendarapp he uses. After you grant stepaccess to your netmailand calendars, the app searches for totallythe tidbits of schedule-related information you have stored in your accounts, gathering it togetherand presenting it cleanly inside individual calendar events. All Whaley had to do was tap the entry for the day’s travels, and the flight numbers and gate information were right there, saving him from potentially missing his flight.
Tempo is but iodinof a growing number of “smart” apps that use arrangedcountersignalgorithms in order to give you ato agreaterextentcompetentand more personalized mobile experience.
For those of us give careWhaley, whose lives are generally a bit chaotic and disorganized, an app like Tempo croupebe a life-saver — as long as we’re unforcedto sacrifice some of our privacy. You see, in order for an app to take upthe intelligence required to become a sort of in the flesh(predicate)assistant, it needs to know a lot about you. Who your friends are, what’s on your schedule, where you work, where you live, and what subjects interest you the most. You have to hando'era a couple of(prenominal)passwords and fill in some private details. But onceyou’ve relinquished that data, you can get a vastly richer and more valuable experience from your consumer device. It’s almost like your phone becomes sentient.
And — the stylemarkof whateverAI-based app — the more you use it, the better it gets.
Take Tempo, for example. For an event like “Meeting with Robert at Mexico Au Parc,” the app would bundle together Robert’s contact information, any electronic mailcorrespondence about the meeting and any abandoneddocuments, the location information for the restaurant Mexico Au Parc, and directions on how to get there. It would package all(prenominal)of this into one entry within the app, onwith buttons to easily send a message or email Robert if you wind up running late to the meeting. The benefits are clear. With a “dumb” calendar app, you’d need to scour multiple apps to get all that information — the calendar, email, messages, contacts, maps and directions. Here, it’s all in one place.
Tempo’s not butin the smart calendar space. Other players include mornand the latest entrant, Any.DO’s CAL app.
But that’s notwithstandingone segment of the AI app sphere. Google Now. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired
Google Now. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired
Google Now, createdirectly into newer Android devices and available to iOS users via the Google Search app, is alike-mindedapp that aggregates all sorts of information relevant to your needs and interests. It uses all the infoaccessible through your Google account and from the sensors in your smartphone (you give it leaveto gather inboth), and it provides all sorts of helpful guidance, showing you weather in your area, sports scores, package tracking info, breaking news stories, and traffic alerts for your foolingcommute. Everything is presented cleanly is a colorful interface that resembles a lotof cards. Google Now can overlysurface travel information, like boarding passes, and it can help you find hotel reservations, calculate immaterialcurrency transactions, and even help with on-the-spot phrasetranslations.
AI is also prevalent in a number of event huskingand activity recommendations apps, like Weotta. This app tracks affinities between a user’s interests, upcoming events, come aboutplaces in the area, and the interests of their friends. It combines this information with other things, like natural nomenclaturephrase extraction and user location, to deliver timely, relevant, and socially benignantsuggestions of things to do.
An app called Triposo uses machine learning techniques to help predict what you’d like to do when you’re traveling — like a smart travel guide.
“We’re tryto approach travel guides from an algorithmic, Google-like perspective,” Triposo co-founder and COO Richard Osinga tells Wired. Triposo uses what it calls an “opinion mining” algorithm. The company analyzes the natural language utilisein online reviews to determine whether people who have affixabout a particular place liked it, and what on the buttonthey liked about it. This helps the app suggest places for very specific qualities — like a restaurant that has spectacular Bolognese, or a hotel that is oddlyclean.
It also uses the time of day, your GPS location, and local weather to suggest things to see and do while you’re traveling.
That, paired with analysis of the behaviors and opinions of other users, lets Triposo meetout what activities people are most likely to be interested in at a certain time — you’re probably not looking for a history museum at 2am in in Paris — and how far they are willing to travel to do that. This means you can nix all the planning you’d normallytensenessabout before a vacation, and be confident that you’ll find unique, interesting attractions no outcomewhat part of town you’re wandering around.
But the ability for the apps on our smartphones do this sort of AI and on-the-fly processing wasn’t feasible even just a few years ago.
According to Tempo CEO Raj Singh, in that locationare four factors making today’s smart apps possible. First, storage and figuringis cheaper than ever before. Lower server costs and cloud reckonmake including AI an affordable option for startups. There’s also greater openness and portability when it comes to data, thanks to sign-in technologies like OAuth and more opengenus Apisfor developers to use. Indeed, for Weotta, significant enhancements to MongoDB, Redis, and Facebook Open Graph are what make it contingentfor the app’s developers to come up with increasingly better recommendations at a fraction of the computational overhead it would have taken in the past.
Another important factor: Many app users have accepted the tradeoff that they can get a better user experience in exchange for a little less privacy. The idea of “handing over the keys” isn’t as scary — a few years ago, linking your Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts to a single app would have been unheard of. Lastly, the improved mobile ecosystem in general makes AI apps possible. That is, the numerous (and more advanced) sensors embedded in each device paired with a super-fast, persistent 4G LTE or Wi-Fi data connection allow apps to gather a wealthinessof information and ping their own servers, pushing relevant information to your phone’s screen in a snap.
But this is just the beginning of artificial intelligence infiltrating our mobile lifestyle. It can also be used to enhance other experiences in the real world. Bay worldstartup Anki, which debuted with a small amount of fanfare at WWDC in June, has shown us a glimpse of this future: How machine learning algorithms can go beyond just a figuredevice to actually power and give personality to toys. In Anki’s case, the company has made toy race cars that know when to haveopponents, when to speed up, and when to hit the brakes to avoid crashing out of a race.
As for today’s apps, the AI-based experiences aren’t perfect yet. If you’ve got multiple contacts with the same name, Tempo mayinitiallyget confused with which details to pull up. Or if your friends are interested in sports and you’re not, you may have to toss a bunch of recommendations in Weotta until it learns you don’t care about going to the nextbaseball game. But by and large, AI apps are blossoming. And with their growth, the stress and time involved in planning events, travel, and even your day-by-dayerrands are diminishing.
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Materials taken from WIRED
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