AI: the motor of advanced applications

AI (Artificial Intelligence) has crept into our lives almost imperceptibly. If you use a smart assistant like Siri on an iPhone or Google Assistant on an Android phone, you already rely on AI. You talk to your phone, ask about the weather and add items to your to do list. The assistant also learns your habits and warns you about traffic problems when you leave for your weekly yoga class. And smartphones will only get smarter. According to research firm Gartner by 2020, one in five interactions with your smartphone will take place via a smart assistant. Apps will become less important since the interaction with them is less natural than with a smart assistant.

It should thus come as no surprise that AI took centre stage at the Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona. For instance, Motorola announced that it will incorporate Alexa in its Moto phones. Alexa is the intelligent assistant at the heart of the Amazon Echo. And Huawei equipped its flagship Mate 9 with Alexa as well. Meanwhile Samsung has released its own smart assistant for smartphones: Bixby.

AI improves smartphone performance

AI has also been introduced in smartphones in less visible ways. For example, the Huawei P10 learns the order in which the user performs tasks and other habits. Armed with that knowledge, the smartphone is able to allocate resources such as memory more efficiently and thus improve its own performance.

Self-driving racing cars 

The autonomous vehicles that were clearly present at the MWC fit into the AI trend. These cars get masses of data to process from various sensors. They interpret these data on a specially designed processor with smart algorithms, in order to make the right decisions. The company Roborace presented the first autonomous racing car at the MWC: the Robocar. This electric car powered by AI tops out at 320 km/h.

The car that thinks along with you 

But AI in the car means more than self-driving. For example car manufacturer, Peugeot announced the Instinct concept car, which thinks along with the driver and other passengers. The car looks in the agenda of the driver and already knows the destination. Instinct also senses how the driver feels and adapts accordingly. For example if you get stressed out in your car after a hard day, it puts the driver's seat in the relax mode.

Read more

Interested in other trends that will soon be fully part of our daily lives? Then read the interview with Werner De Laet, the article on 5G and IoT or the article on Big Data.