Editor’s note: Artificial intelligence (AI) is behind many of Google’s products and is a big priority for us as a company (more about that at Google I/O next week). Before the festivities commence, we’re sharing how AI already affects your life in ways you might not know, and how people from all over the world have used AI to build their own technology.

AI often sounds like some far-off science fiction concept, but it’s actually behind a lot of things you encounter in your daily life. Here’s the rundown: we train a software system with lots of examples so that it can pick up on patterns. Rather than telling the computer that all spam emails contain the phrase “new weight loss trick!,” you train it on millions of examples of spam, making small corrections until it can pick out the pattern on its own. This ability to learn patterns, called machine learning, makes your life easier in many ways—read on for 13 of them!



Fun stuff

1. Search for “dogs” or “hugs” in your Google Photos library to find your favorite furry friends and (non furry) moments. Even if you haven’t captioned any of your photos, Google can surface the ones that have the object or action you’re looking for.

2. Google Play Music delivers personalized recommendations to play the right music for any moment. By taking into account things like time of day or weather, Play Music can suggest the right music for cooking dinner or watching the sunset.

Productivity and security

Helping you out in the world





To learn more about how AI is behind our products, tune into the I/O livestream next week, starting on Tuesday May 8 at 10 a.m. PDT.

