In a series of articles on AI/ML and their application in contact centers, this is the first article demystifying the technology that is driving a massive change across all industries. Some even say, it is ushering in the fourth industrial revolution.

Machine learning can loosely be described as a computational method of remembering patterns and relations in a given data set. A trained system then guesses the outcome each time a similar new input is given.

In a popular implementation, machines are supervised to learn to identify a dog among other objects in a picture. After training the system on several such pictures, the system learns to identify patterns that relate to a dog in a picture. Everytime a new picture is parsed, the system then successfully identifies a dog. The same technology is used to build speech recognition systems. It is hard to achieve 100% accuracy in such systems, however, the accuracy rates are high enough to be used in commercial environment and be mass produced.

The core technology has been around with us since 1950s. We can trace academic papers proposing ‘neuron like’ architectures to perform basic tasks. The technology received a philip when the computation capability of processors increased drastically.

AI-ML revolution is slowly taking over many use cases. It has and will become pervasive. Any organization or individual should either adopt or risk falling behind the curve. It will become the electricity of the modern world. Decision makers should take cognizance and welcome not resist its adoption in their organization.

Check out how Speech AI voice Assistants and speech recognition are making their way in every day life.