Did you know there’s a bit of artificial intelligence (AI) magic behind the scenes helping to make your holiday dreams come true? Santa’s little helpers have gone high-tech this year. From finding the perfect gift to AI-enabled toys and even composing a holiday song—that truthfully will take a bit more refinement before it becomes a holiday classic—AI has infiltrated our holidays from start to finish.

AI drives online shopping experiences

Those of you who are adept behind the keyboard might be surprised that this hasn’t been true for years, but the scales have tipped in favor of online shopping with 51% of the Deloitte 2017 Holiday Retail Surveyrespondents saying they would be making the bulk of their purchases online this holiday season. In the past, shoppers would research and compare prices online, but the majority still went to stores to make their purchases.

Artificial intelligence algorithms help make online shopping experiences more personal. AI gets to know your preferences and behaviors to provide personal recommendations and save you the time of culling through thousands of product results to find just what you’re looking for. This AI tech is getting so good that it knows what you want—and can suggest complementary products—even better than you do.

The fashion retailer Stitch Fix is the perfect implementation of this technology. Customers fill out a style profile and personal stylists, heavily guided by algorithms, pick out items the customer will most likely enjoy. The algorithms keep getting smarter based on the ongoing feedback of the customer when they return an item because they don’t like it. These algorithms can help streamline our shopping experience to reduce the amount of choices we have. Increasingly, shoppers are preferring to use voice-search enabled assistants to shop and ComScore predicts that by 2020, 50 percent of all searches will be voice activated. Yep, you guessed it. AI at work again.

AI enhances customer service for retailers

Another way AI supports our online holiday shopping experience is through the use of chat bots. We likely won’t be able to determine if we are chatting with a human or a chatbot in the future as they step in to guide our purchases and handle questions about orders that have historically required retailers to hire a bunch of seasonal staff for the holidays. The North Face currently offers direct interaction with its IBM’s Watson-supported system and customers to help determine what item is the best for the customers’ needs. Chat bots are also used to answer queries or FAQs that can bog down human customer service personnel and have the capability to funnel customers that require human intervention to a human.

AI is being used by some stores to provide customers with a customized and personal experience in the store similar to what they get when shopping online. The Mall of America launched E.L.F., short for Experiential List Formulator, to help shoppers plan a personalized shopping experience by using the brains of an IBM Watson-enabled platform. The entire system is driven by AI and can understand through voice recognition technology queries and sentiments of customers and can output a personalized plan for each customer based on their answers to a series of questions.

AI impacts retailer’s operations

In addition to the customer-facing impacts of AI to the holiday shopping experience, there’s a tremendous amount of AI tech being utilized behind the scenes as well. From insights to manage inventory and to optimize supply chains and delivery routes, AI helps make retail more efficient.

A modern “Silent Night”

And perhaps the most entertaining use of AI for the holidays is experiments to have AI compose new holiday songs. Although more fine tuning is needed before these holiday melodies become classics, this early work provides interesting insight into the possibilities for AI and human collaboration for music composition. A team of computer scientists at the University of Toronto first fed the machine hours of pop songs so the algorithm could understand the elements of what makes a good song. Then they had it write a story about a picture of a Christmas tree with presents underneath it. The outcome of this effort is a tune that shows some promise but still needs quite a bit of work, but it also supports the idea that AI might be a “great band member” in the future and that humans and AI will continue to collaborate to make music that we all can enjoy. Thomas Holm, a Norwegian “The Voice” contestant, is the musician that collaborated with Microsoft to refine the lyrics and finalize a song created by artificial intelligence called “Joyful Time in the City,” and this experiment gives us a good look at how music composition might happen in the future with the support of AI.

AI has infiltrated this holiday season like never before. In most cases, the efficiencies and conveniences AI enabled retail provides us are welcome by all.

Bernard Marr is a best-selling author & keynote speaker on business, technology and big data. His new book is Data Strategy. To read his future posts simply join his network here.

Credit: Forbes

Zurich Insurance is deploying artificial intelligence in deciding personal injury claims after trials cut the processing time from an hour to just seconds, its chairman said. 

"We recently introduced AI claims handling, and saved 40,000 work hours, while speeding up the claim processing time to five seconds," Tom de Swaan told Reuters.

The insurer had started using machines in March to review paperwork, such as medical reports. 

"We absolutely plan to expand the use of this type of AI (artificial intelligence)," he said. 

Insurers are racing to hone the benefits of technological advancements such as big data and AI as tech-driven startups, like Lemonade, enter the market.

Lemonade promises renters and homeowners insurance in as little as 90 seconds and payment of claims in three minutes with the help of artificial intelligence bots that set up policies and process claims. 

De Swaan said Zurich Insurance, Europe's fifth-biggest insurer, would increasingly use machine learning, or AI, for handling claims. 

"Accuracy has improved. Because it's machine learning, every new claim leads to further development and improvements," the Dutch native said. 

Japanese insurer Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance began implementing AI in January, replacing 34 staff members in a move it said would save 140 million yen ($1.3 million) a year. 

British insurer Aviva is also currently looking at using AI. 

De Swaan said he does not fear competition from tech giants like Google-parent Alphabet or Apple entering the insurance market, although some technology companies have expressed interest in cooperating with Zurich.

"None of the technology companies so far have taken insurance risk on their balance sheet, because they don't want to be regulated," he said. 

"You need the balance sheet to be able to sell insurance and take insurance risk," he added.

Fear is a type of emotion that happens when you are in danger or pain or by any other factors. This emotion happens to all the people. But some people get fears for everything they saw in front of them. Getting release from that hell is very tough. It takes some long time to cure. 

Do you have a fear? I think all of us have fear. But if you get phobia, what will you do? Oh! It’s very scary question! Don’t worry we have a solution now! You can delete your fear now. Yes!

Do you want to wipe it out the fear from your brain?

Now you can erase your fear from your brain. Say thanks to Artificial Intelligence! 

Using Artificial Intelligence and brain scanning technologies researchers have found that we can eliminate specific fears from our mind. This technique is a great solution to treat the patients with conditions such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and debilitating phobias.

In a normal method of therapy, doctors force their patients to face their fears in the hope they will learn that the thing they fear isn’t harmful after all. This traditional therapy may take some long time to cure their patients. 

But in an upcoming technique they scan patient’s brain to observe activity and then simply identify complex patterns that mimic a specific fear memory. This technique called as called “Decoded Neurofeedback”.

For their experiment, neuroscientists selected 17 healthy volunteers rather than patients with phobias. For volunteers, researchers have created a mild “fear memory” by giving electrical shock when they saw a certain computer image. Then they started to get fear for certain images, exhibiting symptoms such as sweating, faster heart rate. Once they had the pattern of this fearful memory, researchers attempted to overwrite this natural response by offering the participant a small monetary award.

Once the researcher team was able to spot that specific fear memory, they used Artificial Intelligence AI image recognition methods to quickly read and understand the memory information. This treatment has major benefits over traditional drug based treatments. Someday, doctors could simply remove the fear of height or spiders from people’s memory – the process is going to be very easy and normal in future days. 

Dr. Ben Seymour, University of Cambridge’s Engineering Department said, 

Google is always doing some innovative experiments for its users. For example “Chrome Experiments” is a page where we can see thousands of innovative web apps. They are surprising their users with their new ideas.

 

As we all know, Companies are using Artificial Intelligence for their new ideas. Google widely using machine learning technology in their products to better serve its users. For example, if you search for cats in Google Photos it shows all the pictures of cats only. There are lot of animals in this world.  But search results show cats only. How? It’s because of machine learning. It knows what the animals looks like by analyzing thousands of animal pictures and recognizing patterns between them.
 

The machine learning technology is very complex to understand. But Google took some extra steps to make of its machine learning technology more accessible to people who are interested in artificial intelligence. Now it’s very easy to play with machine learning. Now you can explore machine learning by playing with pictures, language, music, code and more.
 

Google introduced a new website called A.I. Experiments. This website contains eight web tools to play. I tried it and I definitely believe that you will love it.
 

Quick Draw is one of the projects in A.I. Experiments. It asks you to draw simple objects like sun, fan, bicycle or anything you want and the computer will automatically guesses what you are drawing. It identifies the right answer in a very quick amount of time. It guesses the answers by collecting the experiences from other people’s doodles.
 

Giorgio Cam uses your Smartphone camera to correctly identify the objects. If you place certain objects in front of your laptop or Smartphone camera Giorgio Cam recognizes the objects and turns them into lyrics to a song. A robot voice sings the word over a Giorgio Moroder beat, resulting in some peculiar music.
 

Google Translate Tech is to translate objects you point at into different languages.
 

All other experiments are also very impressive. Check them out, and get experiences that can technology can do.