co.
uk Thursday 04 January 2018 Advertisement Artificial intelligence: the companies behind Britain's 'smart' revolution Google's acquisition of DeepMind has sparked that nation's interest in artificial intelligence.
 Sophie Curtis takes a look at some of Britain's most promising AI companies.
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: Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law Steven Spielberg's 2001 film Artificial Intelligence (AI) depicts a future where robots have become eerily human.
 By Sophie Curtis 12:00PM GMT 02 Feb 2014 Follow When Google forked out £400m for a British technology start-up this week, a lot of people sat up and took notice.
 Not only was it Google’s largest ever European acquisition, but the company in question was virtually unheard of.
 DeepMind specialises in artificial intelligence (AI), otherwise known as 'machine learning’.
 Its technology is designed to mimic human thought processes, and has so far been used in simulations, e-commerce and games, according to its website.
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 For example, a machine learning system could be trained to distinguish between spam emails and non-spam emails, and then be used to classify new email messages into spam and non-spam folders.
 “It’s not just about learning to identify what it is, but learning to identify what it means, and understanding the relationship between different pieces of information,” said Andrew Anderson, chief executive of UK artificial intelligence company, Celaton.
 AI has a wide range of potential applications -- from virtual assistants like Apple Siri, which can interpret and answer questions, to cars that can automatically recognise road signs and games consoles like Xbox Kinect, which can read and understand 3D body movements.
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 “Our goal over the next few years should be to capitalise on our AI heritage and world class talent.
” Some experts have warned that artificial intelligence could lead to mass unemployment.
 Dr Stuart Armstrong, from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, said computers had the potential to take over people’s jobs at a faster rate than new roles could be created.
 He cited logistics, administration and insurance underwriting as professions that were particularly vulnerable to the development of artificial intelligence.
 However, Anderson said AI is not all about “hacking the workforce to pieces”.
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 Analyst firm Gartner predicts that 'smart machines’ will have a widespread impact on businesses by 2020.
 Here are some British companies are best placed to take advantage of this opportunity: SwiftKey SwiftKey uses artificial intelligence to make personalised mobile apps.
 It is best known for the SwiftKey keyboard, which learns from each individual user to accurately predict their next word and improve autocorrect.
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 SwiftKey products were embedded on more than 100 million devices last year, and the company has just launched an app for iPhones and iPads called SwiftKey Note.
 Celaton Celaton’s inSTREAM software applies artificial intelligence to labour-intensive clerical tasks and decision making.
 Every day, businesses receive mountains of information via email and paper.