The AI Effect

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Many people have observed that once a technology becomes widely accepted it is no longer associated with AI. Rodney Brooks, director of MIT's AI lab, was once quoted as saying, "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'" For instance, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) was once a challenge for AI researchers. Now it is simply seen as a part of document imaging. Desktop scanners and their associated software are common tools that almost everyone with a computer has, and OCR software is widely available for use with such tools.

Advances in computer-generated speech and voice recognition, once a stumbling block for AI researchers, have been numerous in the past decade. Nearly all of us have spoken numbers into a phone in an effort to retrieve our bank account information. With the introduction of the Microsoft .NET Speech SDK, even small companies can implement speech-based applications.

These advances continue to seep into our everyday lives and have come to be expected. Something once viewed as new and different quickly becomes old and outdated. Part of the reason for this effect is the tendency of some marketers to disassociate their products with AI. Therefore, an AI-based product may not be easily identifiable.

We are entering an age of amazing technical breakthroughs in which the impossible suddenly becomes ordinary. One day, even the remaining AI challenges, such as natural language understanding, will be resolved. It will be interesting to see what AI may be called then.

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    Building Intelligent  .NET Applications(c) Agents, Data Mining, Rule-Based Systems, and Speech Processing
    Building Intelligent .NET Applications(c) Agents, Data Mining, Rule-Based Systems, and Speech Processing
    ISBN: N/A
    EAN: N/A
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 123

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