Taking the BS Out of AI (Premium)

AI---and AI-adjacent terms like "machine learning"---is perhaps the most-overused personal technology term of 2018. But don't let the marketing abuse get to you. AI is indeed transforming the products and services we use every day. And its use is only going to escalate.

That said, I understand the AI cynicism. I am the original cynic, after all. And we'd never be sober if we played a drinking game that was based on the use of the term AI in industry events, press releases, or blog posts. Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft are pushing the "AI-ness" of every product and service they offer. And it's obvious that, within Microsoft at least, being able to tie an advance to AI is the only way to ensure that it makes its way to the public.

Cynicism is one thing. But one can look objectively at the improvements that Microsoft and the others are making to their offerings and at least come to grips with the fact that meaningful improvements are being made. They may not be AI-based in all cases. But they are still very real and very useful.

Also, this kind of thing isn't new.

Consider the spell-checking functionality that Microsoft and other software makers first added to word processing applications decades ago. This was not an early form of AI, as Microsoft now claims. Instead, Word and other word processors shipped with a hard-coded dictionary of terms and would match the spelling of typed words against it. This functionality is not AI because it couldn't learn. It could improve, but only manually as the user added new words to the dictionary. But those improvements never filtered back to the product, and they couldn't make the word processor better on the user's other PCs, let alone PCs used by others.

Grammar checking, likewise, isn't really AI. It is far more advanced than spell-checking, of course, because a grammar checker needs to understand context. It's not just comparing words against a known-good list. But grammar checkers don't learn. They can only be told to ignore certain rules, or instances of incorrect grammar, that it thinks are correct.

Flash forward to 2018 and Microsoft is promoting AI everywhere. Let's stick with word processing. Here are a couple of good examples.

Today, Microsoft Word expands on spell- and grammar checking and offers more advanced proofing tools which are, if not AI in the strictest sense, are at least smart and connected. These features make Word better for any user---well, any Office 365 subscriber, I guess---and provide Microsoft with a meaningful differentiator for anyone who's cross-shopping with Google Docs, Apple Pages, or any other word processor.

According to Microsoft, the Word editor uses intelligent cloud services to enhance the capabilities of the product's spell- and grammar checking, bringing these features into the 21st century. But it also examines more subtle aspects of a document, including the writing style, and makes suggestions to improve your writing. As...