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Comment by paulie_a | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone done something genuinely useful with ml/ai/whatever outside of advertising or stock trading? I am genuinely curious if it has really been applied to real commercial applications.

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Improvements in search, translation, image recognition and categorization, voice recognition, and text to speech off the top of my head. I'm sure there are a lot more.

Yeah but those are all pretty terrible to the actual end consumer. They might be cool technologies but at the end of the day, I am a user that hates dealing with them. IVRs are terrible a experience. Image recognition is iffy at best. Text to speak is terrible. In 10 years maybe they will have it hashed out... just like 10 years ago, or 20 years ago

What are you talking about? Google assistant is entirely ML driven text to speech and sounds great, wavenet by deepmind is almost indistinguishable from human speech.

I'd have to disagree. While IVR sucks (most current implementations don't use ML by the way), image recognition and categorization is at or better than human levels in most cases now. Cutting edge TTS is now nearly indistinguishable from a human. Just check out some samples [1]. And while translation still sucks, ML based translation is still far better than previous approaches.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/27/17167200/google-ai-speech...

Have you spent real money on something because it used Deep Learning?

Me not.

Maybe indirectly, ads have become more targeted, but we cant be sure how much. It might be just a dtandard small optimization

A lot of problems that involve risk or uncertainty, and that have measurable inputs. Thinks like market segmentation, customer retention and conversion, identifying potential bad debts and fraud, targeting products, identification of product features etc.

Not as sexy as the headlines, and less likely to involve DNN, but still profitable.

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