Cognitive Computing
Cognitive computing is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that focuses on simulating the human mind and its ability to learn and reason—in short, to think and act like a human, utilizing natural language processing, machine learning, and other advanced technologies to recognize patterns, draw conclusions, and make decisions based on the data provided.
Leveraged properly, this technology can generate insights and recommendations that are more accurate and reliable than those of traditional systems, empowering developers to create applications that are more efficient and intuitive than ever before.
There are a wide variety of applications for cognitive computing, from customer service chatbots and autonomous vehicles to image recognition, medical diagnosis, and robotics. It can identify objects in images, detect sentiment in text, and recognize spoken words—creating more natural responses and improving customer service and other applications. The technology can ferret out fraud and predict customer behavior.
And developers are really only beginning to scratch the surface of what cognitive computing
will make it possible.
Best Practices
Cognitive computing does have some potential drawbacks: It requires a lot of data and computing power, for example, making it potentially difficult to program and maintain. Further, there is a risk of bias in the data that is used to train the AI, which can lead to misleading results.
To counter such issues, in recent years many companies began providing ready-to-use cloud-based cognitive computing services. One great example is Microsoft and its suite of Azure Cognitive Services which are provided not only as REST APIs but also include development SDKs libraries in the most popular programming languages in case we want to expand the functionalities.
Microsoft places its cognitive services into three categories:
- Vision: From basic optical character recognition (OCR) to powerful handwritten text recognition to facial recognition, it is now possible to leverage cognitive computing to analyze, classify and understand images.
- Speech & Language: Though provided as separate services, speech-to-text, and translation can be combined with more complex Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions such as
context-aware conversational chatbots. - Decision: These types of service focus on anomaly detection, content moderation, and real-time personalization and recommendations to improve user experience.
When integrated, these services have a variety of uses, including:
- Automated customer service: Cognitive computing can be used to answer customer questions and help them with their policies. This can reduce the need for human customer service representatives, which can save the company money.
- Fraud detection: Cognitive computing can be used to identify patterns in data that may indicate fraud. This can help the company to catch fraudsters before they can do too much damage.
- Claims processing: Cognitive computing can be used to help process claims quickly and accurately. This can save the company time and money, and it can also help to ensure that customers receive the correct payments quickly.
- Risk assessment: Cognitive computing can be used to help assess the risk of different policies. This can help the company to choose the right policies and to price them correctly.
- Marketing: Cognitive computing can be used to help the company target its marketing
efforts more effectively. This can help to improve the company’s bottom line.
Final Thoughts
Cognitive computing applications are becoming increasingly popular—and important—across many industries, generating insights and recommendations that are more accurate and reliable than those of traditional systems. From creating more personalized customer experiences to improving the efficiency of business processes, as this technology continues to evolve it will become even more powerful and useful.
Regardless of where you are on your digital transformation journey, OZ can help you save money, increase scalability, gain competitive advantage, and improve business efficiency and operations. Find out more about our cloud services and assessment offerings here.