Weak AI, or narrow AI: artificial intelligence designed to perform a single task. General AI tries to reproduce the entire human cognitive spectrum, while narrow AI excels at one specific or a few functionalities. Such types of AI are already common and applied in many everyday technologies, but the average person might not get aware. Narrow AI, also known as Weak AI dominates every day in the form of voice assistants and recommendation engines that help us get things done.
This post illustrates several examples of narrow AI with applications across fields.
Voice assistants
Examples of narrow AI are Voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. These are voice-activated systems that can receive commands and provide very specific answers or enforcement of requests. You can have reminders, question response systems, home automation control and even music play based on your voice command. They may look smart, yet they can only do what the people who created them programmed to be done, this is classic for narrow AI.
Narrow AI is also applied as recommendation engines within platforms like Netflix, Amazon and Spotify. These systems are designed to recommend other products/movies/songs based on the collective behaviors, preferences and patterns of not just a single user but all users. Netflix, for instance, uses Ai to suggest a new shows based on what the user has previously watched considering genre rating and viewing time etc. These are fueled by narrow AI, not smarter than your average persons systems optimizing for engagement and happiness.
Image and facial recognition
Image and facial recognition technologies rely heavily on Narrow AI. Examples include figuring out who is in a photograph shared on social media websites like Facebook or Instagram using AI technologies capable of identifying faces for tagging purposes. AI Face Recognition is used to identify individuals in real-time, applied on different locations as an additional increment for security systems. Image recognition is also utilized, for example – in apps like Google Photos that allows users to look up particular objects or scenes from their own photo albums.
AI-powered chatbots are used by many businesses to handle the questions of customers . These bots can handle answering frequently asked questions, troubleshooting problems, or even making suggestions. H&M and Sephora are two great examples of brands using chatbots to help users discover products based on specific parameters. As an example of narrow AI, these chatbots are exactly this domain-specific system capable only to process predefined questions and execute specific actions.
Autonomous Vehicles
But self-driving cars, on the other hand are one of its more complicated practical application. This was just a first crack at an idea, but highlights how the narrow AI of autonomous driving is still very much under development and allows for even further examination when applied to particularly confined example such as navigating through traffic with The Trolley Problem.
A good example of an application is the usage in fraud detection within finance. Banks identify potential fraud using AI algorithms to monitor transactions live in real time, also carried out by credit card companies. It scrutinizes massive transaction data to recognize fraud patterns. When fraud is suspected, the transaction may be automatically blocked of the customer alerted Such implementation of narrow AI not only saves a financial loss but also develops trust in the digital payment systems.
Language Translation
While Google Translate and similar services use narrow AI, providing immediate translation between two different languages using a machine. Although these systems are limited in capability and sometimes find it difficult to understand nuanced language, they work really well for inter lingual (language) communication. Narrow AI can be trained on an enormous number of language examples, hence it is able to achieve relatively reliable translations still subject to errors attributable not so much shortcoming in the model but more to understanding context and idioms which are difficult for a translator.
In other words, narrow AI is — and has become— something that profoundly changes life fully. Advancing tasks in specific ways helps businesses operate more efficiently and makes for friendlier personal experiences, so narrow AI is capable of fostering significant innovation across a number of fields. True, it may not be capable in one way or another outside of its defined parameters but that very same specificity is what enables such powerfulness. We anticipate that narrow AI will grow with increasingly bespoke applications to drive efficiency and user-experience improvements across the board in light of our developing technologies.