How Google uses Machine Learning to reach the top

Has google learned it from the machine or is it the other way round?

Google is to larry, What Machine learning is to future! Sundar, Isn’t it?

The biggest buzzword of all times in the overall technology market is machine learning. With no surprise, Google has mastered it, and with all its applications it has made our life easy!

So, are you questioning yourself of what all achievements do Google possess? Don’t take that pain, we will decode that in this article.

Bloomberg says Google Knows You Better Than Your Doctor Ever Could and I couldn’t have agreed more.

Have you observed that sometimes if you make a typo while searching on Google, Google gives you this message: “Did you mean _____”?

Since I didn’t get the reply of IDK I tried to search it on Bing.

Google is smart, isn’t it? (Disclaimer: Don’t search, you will be disappointed, that was a joke).

Fun Fact: Google has declared itself a machine learning-first company.

With the changes around the globe, be it environmental, digital or even social, technology is the answer. The always updating platform and one step ahead search engine is nothing but, the state-of-the-art in the field. It applies AI to products and to new domains and helps in developing tools to ensure that everyone can access AI.

This is in line with the vision that Google has. The main aim is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful to everyone. This is where AI is helpful, it helps to do things in exciting ways. It helps to solve problems for the users, customers, and the world.

With machine learning, it can develop intelligent systems that are capable of taking decisions on an autonomous basis. It learns algorithms from the past instances of data through statistical analysis and pattern matching. Then, based on the learned data, it provides with the predicted results.

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How Google uses Machine Learning?

Google is the master of all. It takes advantage of machine learning algorithms and provides customers with a valuable and personalized experience. Machine learning is already embedded in its services like Gmail, Google Search and Google Maps.

“Machine learning is a core, transformative way by which we’re rethinking how we’re doing everything. We are thoughtfully applying it across all our products, be it search, ads, YouTube, or Play. And we’re in the early days, but you will see us — in a systematic way – apply machine learning in all these areas.”

– Sundar Pichai, Google CEO

Let’s revisit the definition of machine learning to understand the functioning in a better way!

Machine learning is the most popular technique of predicting the future or classifying information to help people in making necessary decisions. Machine learning algorithms are trained over instances or examples through which they learn from past experiences and also analyze the historical data. Therefore, as it trains over the examples, again and again, it is able to identify patterns in order to make predictions about the future.

All that is fine but, how does Google take advantage of it?

Google knows how usage can be optimized. It uses artificial intelligence and satellite data to prevent Illegal work or trade, like illegal Fishing. Wow!

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Google services, for example, the image search and translation tools use sophisticated machine learning. This allows the computer to see, listen and speak in much the same way as humans do. Much wow!

Google uses machine learning algorithms to provide its customers with a valuable and personalized experience. Gmail, Google Search and Google Maps already have machine learning embedded in services. Wow!

“Ok Google”(Google Home), can you provide me with some examples of Google’s services that are powered by Machine Learning?

1. Gmail

My social, promotional and primary mails might be different than what you have in your mailbox. This is filtered through Google as it labels the email accordingly. This is where machine learning plays a crucial part. The user intervention is used to tune to its threshold and when a user marks a message in a consistent direction, Gmail itself performs a real-time increment to its threshold and that’s how Gmail learns for future and later uses those results for categorization.

Smart replies:

This is really a smart move made by Google. Now, with the help of this feature, you can reply instantly in a second. With the suggested replies given by Gmail.’ Smart Replies’ and ‘Smart Compose’ are indeed the best products that Google has given to its customers. This is also a major reason why Google stands as one of the leading companies today.

Also, it is not just in English. It will bring support in four new languages: Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese.

2. Google Search and Google Maps

This also employs machine learning and while you start typing in the search box it automatically anticipates what you are looking for. It then provides suggested search terms for the same. These suggestions are showcased because of past searches (Recommendations), trend (which everyone is looking for), or from your present location.

For example – Bus traffic delays – Hundreds of major cities around the world, thousands of people traveling, One machine that is learning and informing :P. Google gets all the real-time data on bus locations and forecasts it in a jiffy. So, now you don’t have to wait long hours for your bus.

With the combination of time, distance traveled, and individual events as datasets, it is now possible for Google to provide predictions. Now, there is no need to rely on bus schedules provided by public transportation agencies.

With the help of your location, day of the week, and time of day, your estimated time of arrival (ETA) can be understood.

The best invention ever done for students is Google search and no one will deny it. Google Search and Google Maps use machine learning too and help the people in their day to day tasks. You must be knowing that PV Sindhu created history and won a gold medal in BWF world championships. She is trending and all over the internet.

Google knows everything and when you start typing in the search box it automatically anticipates what you might be looking for and provides suggested search terms. These suggestions could be based on the past searches you have made, what is popular now, or where you are at the time.

I searched for the weather and I got the results in one search. No more information or location was asked to me, Google knows everything. Happy or scared?

Thoroughly understand the machine learning concepts from Machine Learning Tutorial Suite

3. Google Assistant

It helps one to assist in everyday tasks, be it household chores or a deal worth crores. The Google Assistant makes it easy for you to search for nearby restaurants when it’s raining heavily, helps you to buy movie tickets while on the go and find the nearest theatre from your place. Also, helps you to navigate to the theater. In short, you don’t have to worry when you have a smartphone, because Google takes care of everything.

4. Google Translate

The world is migrating. Leave the rest of the world, at least 24 languages are spoken in India itself, with over 13 different scripts and 720 dialects. Well, if we talk about the world there are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today. Can’t thank Google enough cause we’ve all used Google Translate at some point (I hope, you travel a lot too).The best is that it’s free, fast, and is generally accurate. Its translation of words, sentences, and paragraphs have helped many to decode and understand.

It is true that it is not 100% accurate when it comes to larger blocks of text or for some language, but it can provide people with a general meaning to make the understanding less complex. All this is possible because of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). So, no matter how much you hate mathematics or statistics you will have to thank and love it :P.

This is a process where computers analyze millions of existing translated documents from the web to learn vocabulary and look for patterns in a language. After that Google translates it. It then picks the most statistically probable translation when asked to translate a new bit of text.

5. Google Photos

In today’s time, when the world is going gaga over pictures and is addicted to Instagram, Google Photos play an important role for Gen X and Gen Z. It is an app that stores your gallery online on a cloud, so you can access it anytime and anywhere. The best thing is that all your photos are present in a single location.

It also collects pictures of the same people or objects into organized groups. All these tasks are done automatically and an album is created by Google, which collects photos taken during a specific period, such as on a vacation, office, etc. and organize it into an album of showing the “best” photos from that trip or week. The photos will be tagged with well-known landmarks they depict and people that appear frequently.

My personal favorite is that it helps to declutter and tracks down space-wasting documents. It asks you before it removes these images from the folder. It also recommends you as well as duplicates the image so that the original one does not tamper.

Are you clear with the uses of machine learning in Google till now? Share your queries in the comments.

6. Google Music

There is no second thought in saying that Spotify is the master of music recommendation system. It is new to India and everyone is taking it too seriously. Even I did that until I knew that both, Spotify and Google Music (music streaming services) have 30 million-plus songs available for streaming.

Spotify allows you to add the utmost of 10,000 tracks from its catalog. While with Google Play Music, you are able to handle up to 50,000 own songs without making any subscription. Google Play Music creates recommendations based on what you’re already listening to. So now you can listen to the music you have played in the past, music depending on your mood or music that Google play suggests (Because Baas Bajna Chahiye Gaana. #Punintended).

7. Speech Recognition: Ok, Google. Need I say more?

The speech recognition feature enables the user to convert audio to text by applying powerful neural network models in an easy-to-use API. Currently, the API recognizes 120 languages and its variants to support the global user base. Through this voice, command-and-control can be enabled and the audio can be transcribed from the call centers. Also, the processing of real-time data can be done. Starting from streaming to prerecorded audio, speech recognition has mastered it all and all credits can be given to Google’s machine learning technology.

Get to know about the Artificial Neural Network in detail

8. Google Translate

During the earlier times (I mean till 2015), it was a very time-consuming thing to translate the text from an unknown language to a known language. Using word-for-word was not that effective as the reader has to mandatorily know the grammar rules and has to keep in mind all language versions while translating the whole sentence.

But, Google Translate is here to the rescue, so now you can take the backseat and let Google do all the talking. It recognizes that a picture contains text and where it is in the picture. It translates it in real-time. It is a multilingual machine translation service developed by Google, that too free of cost. It is available in 103 languages and rather than translating it in any other language, it first translates text to English and then to the target language. It serves around 500 million people daily.

9. Reverse Image Search

I was searching for Image search and I got to know that it came into existence because of J-LO. It was introduced on July 12, 2001, due to a demand for pictures of Jennifer Lopez’s green Versace dress. This demand was so huge that the regular Google search couldn’t handle and the platform was flooded. Gradually different features were introduced and later on in 2011, reverse image search functionality was added to it.

Image search creates categories that you might be looking for. With the image search, it becomes easy to search for similar images. It also helps to find the websites that contain these images and the other sizes of the picture you searched with.

10. Google Adsense

With the help of machine learning, Google keeps track of the users’ search history. With the help of that history, it recommends the advertisement to the user as now its aware of its target market. It’s heavily based on the search history data and machine learning helps Google to achieve this.

It created a win-win situation. With Google AdSense, the website owners earn money from their online content and AdSense works by matching text and display ads to the site based on the content and the visitors.

11. Google Adwords

With machine learning, Google Ads has helped the advertisers to pay to display brief advertisements. With that service offerings, product listings, video content have also came into the picture. Then, the mobile application installs within the Google ad network to the web users was also common.

Summary

By now, you must be aware of the amazing ways by which Google uses machine learning. With all these technologies and applications, work and life have become very convenient. With data availability, Google has become powerful and is enabling new solutions to problems in this modern age.

Now, it’s time to check – How Dell & Harley Davidson uses Machine Learning with Machine Learning Case Studies

Know any other way by which Google uses machine learning? Do share with us through comments.