Have you ever paused to think how you are surrounded by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology on a daily basis? Google maps uses AI to improve its traffic and ETA prediction, Uber uses Machine Learning (ML) to determine the optimal price of a ride and the best possible route when you pool with someone, banks are now using AI and ML to convert handwriting on cheques into digital format when clients upload an image of the cheque through their apps, the list goes on. Needless to say, AI is also bringing about waves of innovation in the e-commerce sector. Many e-commerce businesses are using AI to understand their customers better, to provide a better customer experience and to drive more sales. One of the interesting ways in which they achieve this is by using visual data to correctly classify objects.
Supervised Learning and Image classification When a piece of AI software is used to "train" itself on an existing data set, it can then make accurate predictions on an unseen data set. This is called supervised learning. Image classification is a sub category of this type of learning. As an example, to "train" your software to understand the difference between a cat and a dog, you feed it hundreds of images of cats and dogs with the correct label. It correlates certain elements of the images with their corresponding labels and goes Eureka! These "ABC" features on an image imply it is a cat and these "XYZ" features on an image imply it is a dog. When you feed a new set of images of cats and dogs without any labels, the system is expected to correctly label them by itself.
Image classification in e-commerce E-commerce sites are leveraging advanced implementations of image classification to provide an enhanced customer experience. Take Pinterest, for instance. Their Chrome extension allows users to select any item in a photo online and search it through their database to find similar looking items.
It is not just Pinterest that is leveraging this technology. Big brands like eBay and Target are also using the immense power of this technology to drive their sales. Today, you do not have to browse through hundreds of options and tire out your eyes before finalising an outfit or an upholstery for your furniture. Like something your friend is wearing? Click a pic and browse
online. Found a great lampshade at a hotel and want to buy one for your home? Click, click, click!
SEO and image metadata Organic traffic is the traffic that comes to your site from unpaid sources and helps in ranking your site higher in search results. It is very crucial to the success of your business. A way to achieve organic traffic is to utilise Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - a set of rules to be followed for a search engine like google to rank your site higher. Today, e-commerce websites are using AI technology to optimise their images for better SEO. Writing descriptive keywords in image tags is one of the ways to optimise images and also a tricky one when you are dealing with hundreds or thousands of images. Staples, an office supply retail chain, distributes its products worldwide. A large proportion of their sales comes from their e-commerce website. To stay ahead of competition, they had to leverage AI technology to tag their images in different languages to target their global customers. They used Clarifai's technology to achieve this feat. Their image recognition technology is cutting edge - their API not just directly translates English tags into other languages, but also takes context into consideration. For example, "crane" (a bird) versus "crane" (the machine) and other such words are correctly translated by their software. Staples saved 5 figures worth in agency costs by using their technology.
Conclusion AI technology has come a long way since its inception and can be employed almost everywhere to optimise business. Visual search is a revolutionising trend that can be used to show similar looking products to you, to recommend products that go along with your search results and to add rich tags to your images etc. Watch our space to keep up with the ever changing trends!