Practical Artificial Intelligence with Swift

Chapter 2. Tools for Artificial Intelligence

This chapter is the first of two that explores the tools that you’re likely to encounter when building artificial intelligence (AI) features using Swift. We’re taking a top-down approach to AI, which means that you’re probably going to be picking a tool based on the practical problem you want to address, rather than for a more esoteric or academic reason.

Note

We have nothing against a more esoteric academic approach. All of your authors come from an academic background. And there are plenty of fabulous books and other content out there that explores the theoretical as well as algorithm- and science-focused side of AI. You can find our recommendations on our website. As we said earlier, in “A Typical Task-Based Approach”, the book isn’t called Interesting but Divorced from the Reality of Using Such a System in the Real World AI with Swift.

Our discussion of the tools for practical AI takes the same perspective: we care about what the tool can do more than we care about how it works. We also care about where it fits into a potential pipeline that you’d be using to perform a given task. In Chapter 3, we look at finding or building a dataset from the same perspective.

Why Top Down?

AI has shifted toward implementing rather than exploring the problem. This book is part of that shift. We want to help you build great Swift apps, with deeply practical implementations of AI–powered features. Although it’s really interesting how, for example, ...