They do it much better than anything you can hard code currently.

That is indeed a poor use. Searching traditionally first and falling back to it would make way more sense.

Google’s algorithm has pretty much always used AI techniques.

It doesn’t have to be a synonym. That’s just an example.

Typing diabetes and getting medical services as a result wouldn’t be possible with that technique unless you had a database of every disease to search against for all queries.

The point is AI means you don’t have to have a giant lookup of linked items as it’s trained into it already.

No it’s not.

Fuzzy matching is a search technique that uses a set of fuzzy rules to compare two strings. The fuzzy rules allow for some degree of similarity, which makes the search process more efficient.

That allows for mis typing etc. it doesn’t allow context based searching at all. Cat doesn’t fuzz with pet. There is no similarity.

Also it is an AI technique itself.

Honestly I feel people are using them completely wrong.

Their real power is their ability to understand language and context.

Turning natural language input into commands that can be executed by a traditional software system is a huge deal.

Microsoft released an AI powered auto complete text box and it’s genius.

Currently you have to type an exact text match in an auto complete box. So if you type cats but the item is called pets you’ll get no results. Now the ai can find context based matches in the auto complete list.

This is their real power.

Also they’re amazing at generating non factual based things. Stories, poems etc.

If you ignore the privacy issues having everyone use biometrics for everything would massively cut down on fraud.

I’m not advocating for it at all. But you can’t deny it would ruin a lot of scams.

I use it all the time at work as a programmer. Not that often for generating code but for learning new languages and frameworks quickly.

I noticed our juniors are able to get up to speed incredibly fast by leaning on it when picking up new things as well.

We also experimented with it for sentiment analysis of customer feedback and the results were very impressive.

It is genuinely a game changer when used correctly. The issue I see is people trying to push it everywhere.