In this pandemic situation, the physical world is converted into a digital one bringing about lifestyle changes; people and businesses need to adapt themselves to keep up with the new reality. The goal of this article is to understand what kind of changes happened, and how AI can contribute to developing solutions to the created situation and delivering more efficient results. I would like to share some useful tools, and applications that exists or have been developed during this pandemic situation, and shows how AI helps humanity for improving their life quality.
It is not surprising that nowadays AI is used in almost all domains such as management, health, lifestyle, etc.
Now let’s dive deeper and understand how AI is used these days which helps humanity to have a better life routine.
Health Control
Chat-bot Symptom Checker
One of the things concerning all of us during these days is understanding if we do have COVID-19 without going to hospital or visiting doctors. This is because, even if we think we’re healthy, when we come out of the house the chances of getting the virus will increase. AI comes for help in this situation; there exists chat-bots which helps you find out if you have virus symptoms or not. This virtual assessment tools advise if you need to visit a doctor in person, or the symptoms you have are not related to the virus and there is no need to visit any medical centers. Chat-bot gives information by traversing through a “decision tree” based on the users’ input, in this case the symptoms. It is worth to mention if a chat-bot’s decision tree is not updated frequently, hence is not aligned with latest pandemic expert recommendations, suggestions made by the chat-bot will become obsolete.
Below are few examples of chat-bots that checks COVID-19 symptom:
- Center of Disease Control and Prevention Symptom Checker Chat-bot
- Buoy Health Symptom Checker Chat-bot
COVID-19 Sounds App
There exists a cough detection tool, which identifies either the way you cough is similar to the way a person with COVID-19 coughs. This AI tool analyses the coughing sound of all the people with COVID-19 and finds a sound pattern that can predict if you’re coughing like a person who has the virus or is a normal cough sound.
COVID-19 sounds App link developed by University of Cambridge:
Such tools eliminate the need of physical presence in places that are risky. Also, it can be useful in post-pandemic situation in the long term. When we emerge from this crisis, chat-bots and other AI applications are likely to become digital portals for interactive healthcare, helping patients find a doctor or service and facilitate symptoms verification. Utilization of such applications may result in better healthcare management and customer engagement in near future.
Daily Life
Shopping Assistant
During these days, one of the most challenging things is going out for shopping. The problem is that when you’re not physically out, sometimes you forget to buy the goods that were necessary, and this decreases the efficiency of the shopping. Due to this inconvenience virtual assistants have become more popular. These smart assistants can improve our shopping experience by telling us what we’re going to need in the near future, based on our purchase history. An application called Boxed is basically trying to predict when you’ll run out of snacks and toilet paper. This application has “Need These Now” and “Need These Soon” products reminders, which is useful to plan your shopping in advance. This application is developing a new online shopping culture, which will continue to be useful in future. Currently, 26.28% of the world population uses online shopping and would likely want to have assistants who’ll help them not to forget ordering a much-needed item.
Boxed website for food ordering, which tries to do purchase predictions:
AI-Based Personal Trainer
The next big thing in the fitness industry will be AI-based personal trainer. These are applications driven by artificial intelligence which aim to help people achieve their fitness goals. Such applications with the help of AI, can offer personalized fitness and lifestyle plans, using individual’s goals, eating habits, current fitness level, retrieved data from wearable devices, and much more. Moreover, there are applications that can check the workout posture and correct any mistakes, just like a trainer would do. The users only need to use their phone camera, to have a one-on-one setting and receive real-time feedback on their workout posture.
Following links are AI-fitness applications:
Working from Home Challenge
During these days, the culture of working from home is either promoted or forced, asking us to adapt to a new reality, and transforming from physical world into digital platforms. Integration of this new work methodology is proved to be challenging for companies, industries, and employees that have never had working from home experience. Let’s discuss what kind of problems can be solved by AI in this situation.
Conference Calls
Online meetings for many of us is a part of our work culture. During these days even those companies who used to schedule in person meetings have switched to online meetings. Taking notes during such calls sometimes gets challenging, since we may miss writing down an important point due to several reasons.
There exists interesting applications such as Wrappup and Aloe. These applications work like a voice recorder which automatically transcribes your meeting, allowing you to highlight the important parts. Using AI it quickly summarizes the discussion and shares meeting minutes within seconds. Furthermore, these recordings, transcripts and user highlights are accessible for several weeks, for users’ future reference. This provides the meeting participants with more time to concentrate on ongoing discussions, solutions and creative ideas, rather than worrying about writing down the important points and forgetting the details discussed. This tool is useful not only when we are working from home, but also during regular days as our note keeper assistant.
Here are the links to the AI voice recorder applications:
- Voicea Acquires Mobile App Wrappup
- Aloe AI assistant
Daily Tasks Planer
It is hard to have work-life balance when you’re always at home. Because of that having a day planner assistant will help you to be more productive while doing your daily tasks. Futurenda is an app that plans users’ day. After manually inputting to-dos and specifying the deadlines and time to complete, the app uses its masterful AI to organize all the tasks and events automatically. With this kind of efficiency users might now have time to study something.
AI to-do applications Futurenda link:
Automatic time tracker
Working from home is tricky. Some employees work less than required amount of time, while the others work more than expected. Having a productivity detector can help employers understand if an employee, during work hours, is spending time on their work or is surfing the web and wasting time.
Automatic time tracking tools are great for individuals. Such tools have the power of transforming the whole businesses for the better. To help get the team on-board with automatic time tracking, below are the main benefits for CEO’s, managers and colleagues:
1. Accurately diagnosing business health
2. Centralizing company performance data in one place
3. Enabling more accurate budget and project estimation
4. Freeing employees for productive work
With automatic time tracking applications such as Timely by Memory.ai, users need zero training to get started. This application is connected to the applications that users utilize at work. It tracks almost everything such as emails sent, websites visited, documents worked on, calls received, meetings attended and time spent travelling. There will be automatically-generated time-sheets at the end of the day, which users can review and understand how much time they have actually spent on a specific task.
Timely Application link:
All of the tools and applications that are included in this article have been developed before and during the pandemic situation, and now they are becoming more useful as the world is changing. This shows that artificial intelligence and human collaboration together can improve lifestyle of the humanity. Also, for business owners having AI applications or features could help their business to work smarter. Investing in AI is like investing in future.
You can watch “AI in Post-Pandemic Society” webinar with following link:
Maral Chahverdian is a Data Scientist at SmartClick. She is skilled in Traditional Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Visualization, creating dashboards with Python, Rstudio, and Databases. Maral is also passionate about NLP.
