Raise your hand if you use machine learning on a daily basis.
Is your hand up? Well, it probably should be, because guess what? Machine learning is ingrained in your day-to-day life. If you have an email account, command your smartphone via voice control, watch stuff on Netflix, shop on Amazon, or Google anything, chances are good that machine learning has been helping you along.
So let’s take a moment to explore just how powerful and prevalent machine learning is in our modern lives.
Spam Filters
This is a classic example of machine learning. Over 70% of email floating around the web is spam. That’s a lot of phishing messages and Viagra ads! Machine learning weeds out these spammy messages from your inbox, identifying patterns that can separate Nigerian Prince scam emails (and shunt those to your Spam folder) from birthday emails from grandma. Let’s be honest – both have a hard time with capitalization and an affinity for excessive exclamation marks.
Spam or a message from grandma?
Recommendation Engines
If you use Netflix, you’ve seen a machine learning recommendation engine at work. The algorithms study your viewing habits and recommend TV shows and movies based on the behavior that similar watchers have exhibited. But these recommendation engines are also helping people who are shopping, basing recommendations on previous purchasing or viewing history. Websites like Amazon.com and Walmart.com analyze buying behavior to created tailored shopping experiences for their customers.
Speech Recognition
Do you ever wonder how Siri can magically understand what you’re saying, even though the way that you sound and form words might be different than her baseline programming? Machine learning strikes again! Speech recognition algorithms work to account for accents, regional dialects, grammatical errors, and colloquialisms.
Google’s Speling Corecction
Sometimes when you’re searching for song lyrics or someone’s name, you misspell it. No harm, no foul…and maybe no dice. But when Google offers a suggestion on a different spelling or maybe what you might have meant, that’s machine learning! Algorithms look at common searches and their subsequent successful clicks to determine the suggested spelling correction. It also makes for an excellent meme.
“Did you mean…?”
1-Click Checkout
That’s right – if you’ve shopped with 1-click checkout or same-day shipping, chances are good that machine learning is at work to quickly verify that you are indeed you, and not some scammer or bot buying on your account. Businesses can reduce friction and smooth the checkout process for legitimate customers with machine learning, increasing their shopper-to-customer conversion rate and growing profits.
At Sift Science, machine learning is at the core of our product. Our awesome engineering team is constantly working to make our algorithms the most accurate and most powerful tool in our customers’ arsenal against bad guys.
Want to learn more? Download our free e-book on machine learning!