“Don’t make something unless it’s both necessary and useful. But if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful”
That is just the thing Artificial Intelligence does for Human-Computer Interaction systems, it makes it more effective and user-friendly. Machine Learning, a subset of Artificial Intelligence, has been there ever since Alan Turing gave the world machines which can think and learn. Now machines can even detect people and objects (Computer Vision), and synthesize text and speech (Natural Language Processing). This has increased the number of possibilities in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, opening the doors for more human-friendly research in HCI.
Computer Vision
Computer vision has paved the way for many new applications in the field of healthcare, security and many more. Machines can now detect human emotion in seconds, with a high amount of accuracy, thanks to computer vision. The most prevalent area in computer vision is Eye Tracking, which has a huge number of applications from security to healthcare. Eye tracking devices are used in smart security systems and virtual keyboards used by differently-abled people to convey their thoughts and issues effectively. The recent addition to this list is its use in deception detection. The many attributes which can be collected using eye-tracking data, like fixations, saccades, blinks, pupil size can be used for detecting if the person is lying or not. I had the opportunity to work in this field during my research in NTU.
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing is another prominent area which has contributed highly to Human-Computer Interaction. Speech Recognition has made the interaction between human and computer effective to a great extent, that machines cannot only understand the context of the speech but can also predict the sentiment behind it. Something even humans fail to understand often! This has given us many smart assistants like Alexa, Siri, Cortana and many more.
Apart from the above fields, the new trend in Human-Computer Interaction is using brain signals to interact with the computer. We have reached the point where we can upload and download our thoughts, understand and interpret it and can even make things move just by thinking about it!
Thus the future will have a lot in it for us to experience, giving us more revolutionized and ground-breaking inventions as Bill Gates himself quoted,
“A breakthrough in Machine Learning would be worth ten Microsofts!”