Pragmatic AI Solutions are Here and Now

There are well known and valuable business advantages of moving your software or software backend to the cloud. Important application characteristics like scalability, high availability, increased security and performance enhancements that are made possible and affordable by cloud providers like, Amazon, Microsoft and Google. I believe that the average company is just not aware of the existing capability in AI and Machine Learning that are available and affordable right now.

These exciting new capabilities allow for business opportunities in short time periods. What I am referring to is the out of the box capabilities that are currently easily accessible through programming interfaces called API’s (Application Programming Interfaces).

It’s how the modern world exposes powerful capability and makes it easy to access functionality and data. The big three cloud providers have all exposed pre-built AI algorithms that are solving real world problems today.

Before we get started, I want to mention that complex industry specific problems still require custom algorithms and training that require more time and expense to develop. For this post, I am talking about a long list of ready made available blocks of AI capability that can be used individually or in combination.

For example, take AI Vision technology. Tasks such as Image classification for gathering, organizing and classifying images or detecting events for visual surveillance or scene and activity recognition are already readily available. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is not a new technology but having to purchase a special library is no longer required, just call an API to start using it.

Even better, the ability to recognize handwriting and transform it, is available today. Technologies like face detection in images or video is no longer only in the domain of the government, it’s democratized and here for use now. Or maybe you just want to be able to recognize cats in pictures or video, it’s here.

Interested in knowing if a image of a customer is happy or sad without human intervention? Or perhaps, you need to detect if an uploaded image is explicit or offensive. Yes, available today.

That’s just vision technology. There are exciting speech technologies available for everyday use such as speech to text, text to speech so you can read an email out loud or any other use case you can think of. There’s also capabilities like speech translation, speaker identification and verification. On the language area, there is language detection and translation for language enabling apps.

Hopefully, your mind is racing right now, thinking of all the interesting things you could use it for. That’s just scratching the surface on the power and availability of the cloud providers. There’s also search for the web or location aware search of the web or for news. There is image searching and auto suggest.

This all takes me back to my earlier statement. I believe that the average company is not aware of these exciting and affordable AI capabilities that are here and now. Not every AI solution needs to be a custom algorithm.

If you want to talk more about the possibilities of leveraging AI in your business or existing software applications feel free to reach out.

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Mr. Barbato brings over 40 years of experience in the software and technology industries to Third Wave. He has invested over 20 years in banking and highly regulated environments. He guides Third Wave’s expert team in software development and applying Technology Solutions to solve business problems. Follow on twitter: @frankjbarbato