An electronic butler that answers your questions using all the resources of the Internet. An artificial infant you raise from birth, teaching it and helping it develop its own unique personality. A security system that learns your attacks and improves itself. We may not have a HAL-like computer system today, but AI is being used to enhance a wide variety of products and create new applications, and it is fuelling some of the latest hot Internet startups.
People are expensive and error-prone and hard to get hold of.
He uses the example of chess-playing , which was once thought to require intelligence. Likewise, speech recognition is within reach of any reasonably powerful PC, but is not considered a mark of intelligence. A new generation of products hope to use AI to one-up Amazon's methods and win customer loyalty for the sites that use them. Products from US startups such as Saffron Technology and Manna aim to learn the individual user's buying patterns and make personalised recommendations accordingly. Such technology could be the best way of giving retail sites a more personal feel.