Narrow artificial intelligence (narrow AI) is a specific type of artificial intelligence in which a learning algorithm is designed to perform a single task, and any knowledge gained from performing that task will not automatically be applied to other tasks.

Narrow AI supports many commercial applications, including recommendation engines. As learning algorithms become deeper, the applications of narrow AI are also becoming more layered. There is still a lot of debate over how well computers will ever be able to achieve general artificial intelligence, given the complexity of the human brain and the current difficulty that data scientists and ML engineers have creating self-supervised machine learning algorithms.

Artificial narrow intelligence systems are programmed to attend one task at a time by pulling in information from a specific dataset. In other words, such systems do not go beyond the assigned tasks. Unlike general AI, narrow AI lacks self-awareness, consciousness, emotions, and genuine intelligence that can match human intelligence. While such systems may appear sophisticated and intelligent, they operate under a predetermined and predefined set of parameters, constraints, and contexts.

The machine intelligence that surrounds us today is a part of the same narrow AI. Examples include Google Assistant, Siri, Google Translate, and other natural language processing tools. Although these tools can interact with us and process and comprehend human language, they are termed as weak AI as they lack the fluidity or flexibility to think for themselves as humans do.

Let’s consider Siri. It is not a conscious machine. Instead, it is only a tool performing tasks. When we converse with Siri, it processes the human language, enters it into the system’s search engine like Google, and provides results. When someone poses abstract questions such as how to handle a personal problem or deal with a traumatic experience to tools like Alexa or Google Assistant, they either give vague responses that lack sense or provide links to articles on the internet that presumably address the issue at hand.

On the contrary, when we ask a fundamental question such as “what is the temperature outside”, we tend to get an accurate response from virtual assistants such as Siri. This is because answering such basic questions is within the range of Siri’s intelligence for which it is designed.

Moreover, even something as complex as self-driving cars falls under weak AI, as they are trained to navigate the surrounding area with the help of an annotated driving dataset. A typical self-driving vehicle comprises multiple ANI systems that are critical for its smooth movement in a highly complex urban environment.

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