Artificial intelligence is unlikely to replace plain old human intelligence any time soon, but you might be surprised at how many programs are now using it to make our lives easier. If you thought that having a human-like interaction with ChatGPT and DALL-E was the beginning and end of today’s AI, then you’re missing a lot of new and interesting functionality.
Many of the new applications let you speak your requests rather than type them. If you’re of a certain age (young) you might now be using Snap to exchange messages as well as share videos and images. Microsoft’s Bing, Ask AI, Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri are all being called virtual assistants because you can now ask them to do searches and perform tasks like starting your car (assuming it has smart features built-in), make reservations, and give directions. Google Maps now lets you speak to the location you want to be guided to.
Similarly, FaceApp, Lensa, and Facetune now leverage AI to help novices edit the pictures they’ve taken, and Lensa also edits videos. (Some might see a pernicious effect. In this new era, you can no longer believe the pictures and videos that you might see on social media.)
If you want to get creative with images, consider StarryAI, which creates artwork based on your simple text prompt. And you can look at the result and ask for modifications, from hyper-realistic to dreamy surrealistic.
Want to learn another language? Consider Duolingo, which automatically paces lessons in dozens of languages based on your current fluency and progress. ELSA Speak, meanwhile, helps users perfect their English speaking skills, adapting to the user’s accent and color-coding (red, yellow, and green) how close a user is to the acceptable pronunciation.
Are you frustrated with helping your kids with homework assignments that have no relation to anything you, yourself learned in school? Turn to Socratic, which lets you take a picture of the assignment page with your phone, and you get an AI-generated explanation of the assignment and help completing it.
A relatively new program, available on Apple phones, is FitnessAI, which uses artificial intelligence to generate personalized workouts that set the number of reps and weights for each exercise, and tracks programs over time.
It’s easy to wonder where all of this is going, with new announcements of AI-powered robots and human-like robots with human-like facial expressions. Artificial intelligence isn’t taking over the world, but it might be successful in taking over a number of annoying tasks with more human-like assistance.
