Tomorrow is Today

UPDATE: Google’s Cat-Video Identifying Neural Net Now Working to Improve Voice Commands, Image Search, Google Glass and Self-Driving Cars

Google is now using these neural networks to recognize speech more accurately, a technology increasingly important to Google’s smartphone operating system, Android, as well as the search app it makes available for Apple devices.

“We got between 20 and 25 percent improvement in terms of words that are wrong,” says Vincent Vanhoucke, a leader of Google’s speech-recognition efforts. “That means that many more people will have a perfect experience without errors.”

The neural net is so far only working on U.S. English, and Vanhoucke says similar improvements should be possible when it is introduced for other dialects and languages.

Other Google products will likely improve over time with help from the new learning software. The company’s image search tools, for example, could become better able to understand what’s in a photo without relying on surrounding text. And Google’s self-driving cars and mobile computer built into a pair of glasses could benefit from software better able to make sense of more real-world data.

(via Google Puts Its Virtual Brain Technology to Work - Technology Review)

See Also: “Google and Stanford have created the [digital equivalent of the] visual cortex of an infant human”