Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days. All big tech companies are working on their own version and the topic regularly pops up on the news.
Like when one of Google’s programs taught itself how to walk.
Then there was the story about how one of Facebook’s AIs started creating its own language (though it was a bit overhyped). Or when 116 AI experts urged the UN to ban killer robots.
However, my favorite instance must be when Marc Zuckerberg and Elon Musk squared off about artificial intelligence on Twitter.
I've talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2017
As you can see from these instances, artificial intelligence is a hot topic and one that we will hear a lot more about in the future. What you might not know, however, is that even today AI has already found its way into WordPress. There are a number of WordPress plugins already out there that use artificial intelligence.
In this article, we’ll to take a look at who they are and what they employ AI for. We will also give you a short overview about what we are talking about when we say artificial intelligence.
Ready for some next-level stuff? Then let’s get going.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
On the surface, AI is a relatively simple concept. It enables machines to take over tasks that formerly required a human being.
On the one hand, that means that in the future, machines can do more jobs that we don’t want to do or that are dangerous. On the other hand, some people are worried that AI will make a lot of jobs obsolete.
We can already see parts of that in customer support with chat bots or in real life when McDonald’s started replacing workers with self-service kiosks. However, we are not quite at the point where machines will completely overhaul the job market (once again).
Today, what we are mostly dealing with on the web is a subset of artificial intelligence called machine learning. It means that software can learn from experience and base future decision on the knowledge it has acquired.
How is that different than before?
Before this advancement, you had to provide software with set rules to follow and it would operate only within those perimeters. With AI, you can give it algorithms that allow the program to make up its own rules from what it is exposed to and alter them over time. That way, it can adapt to the environment it is operating in, for example, by better understanding user behavior and learning to serve their needs better.
All caught up on AI? Then let’s look at some WordPress plugins that are already taking advantage of it.
WordPress Plugins Using Artificial Intelligence
When going through plugins below, keep in mind that this is still a relatively new industry. While it’s exciting to see what’s already out there, many of the plugins on this list are still in the development stage and experimental. However, they are still worth a look.
WordLift
The first plugin on our list brings the capabilities of a service of the same name to your WordPress site.
The idea behind WordLift is to use AI to process human language in order to make content better. It strives to better understand and provide the kind of information people are looking for and also improve content for search engines. (Kind of like SEO copywriting.)
How so?
For one, it provides content creators with facts, images, links, and visuals to make their content more engaging. Secondly, the plugin aims to make content pieces compatible with Schema markup to improve indexability and SEO. Thirdly, it delivers content recommendations to readers to keep them on the site longer.
The result: increased traffic, page views and conversion rates. What’s not to love?
Breinify
Breinify is a service that collects information about visitors beyond a single website. With the help of artificial intelligence, it aims to learn more about users depending on what other categories of WordPress websites they visit. This information will help you better understand the types of topics they are interested in. At the same time, Breinify shows you in real time the activities happening on your site.
Unfortunately, their WordPress plugin hasn’t been updated in a year, however, the service still exists.
Aimojo
Aimojo is a redesign of an earlier plugin called Affinitomics. Allegedly the new version works ten times faster.
It adds new structured taxonomies to your site. They allow the plugin to better organize your content.The result: better search results, contextual link lists, and menus. As a consequence, it increases usability and conversion rates.
Through artificial intelligence, the taxonomies self-organize and learn from experience. However, again, the plugin hasn’t been updated in a year.
MyCurator Content Curation
Next up is this cloud-based and AI-driven content curation tool. MyCurator helps you discover interesting content in your niche and uses AI to sort what it finds by relevance.
In contrast to RSS feeds or Google Alerts that don’t discriminate between content, it so aims to deliver only what is actually interesting to you. Plus, the plugin learns from your input. By upvoting and downvoting content, you can further improve the results for the future.
Finally, you can also manually add pieces of content you find interesting.
Watsonfinds
Our next Skynet wannabe wants to help you improve your content. It does so by connecting your site to the sentiment analysis of IBM Watson. This gives you insights about the emotions your content may evoke in your audience: joy, anger, sadness, disgust or fear. That helps you fine tune your posts and pages to achieve the goal you are shooting for.
Kindred Posts
Kindred Posts provides your site with a widget to recommend relevant content to visitors. While that is not really a new thing (see related posts plugins), this one uses artificial intelligence to learn more about your visitors and suggest content accordingly.
As a consequence, the more people interact with your site, the more targeted the recommendations become. You can even connect the service with your Google Analytics to track what recommendations get clicked on the most. Plus, the plugin works out of the box with minimal settings.
After the Deadline
This plugin is part of Jetpack. After the Deadline provides AI-driven contextual spellcheck. It doesn’t just find writing errors but also offers smart suggestions to improve your language.
For example, AtD can detect misused words, style errors, clichés, biased languages and more. What’s more, it even explains your errors to you (that smug little bastard).
Once installed, simply switch it on in the WordPress editor. When you do, the plugin will show spelling errors in red, grammar mistakes in green and style suggestions with blue underlining.
Quttera Web Malware Scanner
As the name suggests, Quttera can run malware scans for trojans, backdoors, worms, viruses, spyware, code injections and other digital pests. What’s special about it is that it uses cloud technology and AI to do so.
The plugin uses machine learning to get better at recognizing threats over time. That gives it the ability to not only recognize known threats but also adapt to yet unknown ones.
This is also great news in case your site has landed on Google’s blacklist. The plugin can help you find out the reason and take remedial steps. (Btw, we also have a number of tips what to do if your site got hacked.)
Free Live Chat + 24/7 Automated Bot
Want 24/7 support for your site but don’t have the funds to hire somebody to do it? Then this plugin might be the answer.
It provides a machine learning chatbot that can act on its own as a customer support agent. The bot automatically builds a knowledge base and connects questions to answers. Plus, the bot observes your communication with clients and uses that to improve over time.
That way, it is able to interact with customers in your stead and answer their most pressing questions. Of course, you can always jump in and take over.
WooCommerce Darwin Pricing Integration
This next plugin allows you to integrate the Darwin Pricing software into WooCommerce. That way, you can run geo-targeted sales campaigns that use real-time competition monitoring and artificial intelligence to deliver the most effective discounts.
How does it work? The software collects price data about your competition. It then uses AI and statistical analysis to find the optimal discount in every location and lets you give them out in the form of coupons.
Darwin Pricing also uses machine learning to collect more information about your market. Over time, it will point out business development opportunities.
The Client Relations Factory
TCRF allows users to connect WordPress with a virtual robot platform. That way, you can equip your site with a customizable virtual customer service robot.
The animated character can interact with customers on its own, provide information and support and identify client needs. You can manually update the knowledge it gained during conversations to make it available in the future.
Primal
Primal is another service that lets you show relevant web content to your visitors. It does so by collecting information about your post and page topics and shows up-to-date, relevant content accordingly. Through machine learning, the plugin gets better at its job over time by observing visitor behavior.
Automatic Alternative Textr
You know how providing ALT texts for your images is important for on-page SEO? I’ll be the first to admit that it can be a hassle though.
This plugin hopes to alleviate that by using Microsoft’s Cognitive Services Computer Vision API to determine the content of images and automatically create sensible ALT text.
It hasn’t been updated in a while so I don’t know if it’s still usable. However, I thought it was an interesting example so I included it nonetheless.
Did You Mean
Last on the list, we have another outdated plugin whose goal it is to manage 404 pages and make them more user-friendly. It does so by showing a conditional sidebar widget that only pops when someone goes 404. The widget shows posts that most closely match what users (mis)typed in their URL. It also added features similar to Google autocomplete to the WordPress search bar.
WordPress and Artificial Intelligence – Summing Up
Artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to creep into our lives. It’s a rapidly advancing area of technology that, as we have seen above, has already found its way into the WordPress sphere.
A growing number of plugins use machine learning to improve their performance and offer services that were unavailable before. From language processing, content curation and emotional analysis to automatic support, discounts and image recognition, applications are numerous.
Most plugins on the list are relatively new and/or experimental. It will be exciting to see what other applications for artificial intelligence will see in the future. Just as long as Cyberdyne Systems keeps their hands out of it, I’m all for it.
Do you know additional plugins that include AI or machine learning? What do you think about the development in general? Let us know in the comments section below.
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