Despite its potentially widespread applications, creating a speech recognition software capable of cutting through the nuances and variations in the spoken word has been a task fraught with patchy success, at best. The aim many companies have striven toward is to create a software that can recognize the words in a conversation as well as a human would -- a key requisite for a truly immersive artificial intelligence experience. In a major breakthrough in this endeavor, Microsoft announced Tuesday that it had created a technology that enabled speech recognition systems to transcribe a conversation with the same error rate as their human counterparts. "We've reached human parity," Xuedong Huang, Microsoft's chief speech scientist, said in a statement. "This is an historic achievement."

Microsoft has made a major breakthrough in speech recognition, creating a technology that understands a conversation as well as a person does. In a paper published Monday, a team of researchers and engineers in Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists. The researchers reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent WER the team reported just last month. The 5.9 percent error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversation, and it's the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task.

Biren Gandhi sees Cisco as the torchbearer of drone digital disruption. The flying machines have become mainstream tools for everything from delivery services to video usage. So how can the networking giant--normally known for Internet services, solutions, software and hardware--compete in the unmanned aviation realm? As the world narrows in on artificial intelligence, machines and virtual reality, Cisco too pushes to participate in innovative technology-- and Gandhi is at the helm of this innovation, along with his Cisco "co-conspirators" Nico Darrow and Angelo Fienga. Known as "Cisco's Drone Specialist" but more formally titled Distinguished Strategist, Gandhi speaks at conferences like InterDrone, XPONENTIAL, The Commercial UAV Show, etc. about how the company is moving forward with drone security, collaboration, and infrastructure.

This is the year artificial intelligence came into its own for mainstream businesses, at least as a marketing feature. On Sunday, Salesforce.com, which sells online software for sales and marketing, announced it would be adding A.I. to its products. Its system, called Einstein, promises to provide insights into what sales leads to follow and what products to make next. Salesforce chose this date to pre-empt Oracle, the world's largest business software company, which on Sunday evening began its annual customer event in San Francisco. Oracle calls its product Oracle A.I. Elsewhere, General Electric is pushing its A.I. business, called Predix.

We now have a deep learning model that is able to deliver valuable results, but how can we apply it easily to new data where and when we need to?

Compared to Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google, Apple's AI research projects have been largely inscrutable. But now, that looks like it's about to change. Apple has hired esteemed Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Russ Salakhutdinov as its director of artificial intelligence research, with plans to build a team of researchers for the company in the coming months. Salakhutdinov will remain in his post as an associate professor at CMU, Apple confirmed to BuzzFeed News. Excited about joining Apple as a director of AI research in addition to my work at CMU. Apply to work with my team https://t.co/U2hQl2GdhA

Much of today's hype around artificial intelligence (AI) is concentrated in a few areas: enabling futuristic applications like self-driving cars, helping conversational interfaces like chatbots come to life, and making business more efficient and predictable. But in this episode of "Behind The Numbers," we focus on how AI is being used to spur creativity in areas like art, music and storytelling. The podcast kicks off with a new intro song--at least for this episode. The song, titled "Daddy's Car," is unique because it was generated by AI from Sony's Computer Science Research Lab in Paris and arranged by a human composer, Benoît Carré. Much of the track is generated from suite of Sony's AI tools called Flow Machines, which is trained from around 13,000 existing compositions across a variety of styles.

Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research branch have created a speech recognition system that can pick up the words in a conversation as well as most humans can. The new system was announced by Microsoft in a blog post and the team's findings were published on Monday. The record-breaking tech has hit what the team is calling "human parity" -- that is, it's not perfect, but it makes the same or fewer mistakes in transcription than human professionals. The word error rate of the system was down to 5.9 percent, from the 6.3 percent error rate reported just last month. That's more impressive than it sounds, as humans will commonly mishear words like "have" for "is", or "a" for "the" in transcribing.

You cannot get better at it by reading books and blog posts. In this post, you will discover the simple 6-step machine learning project template that you can use to jump-start your project in R. Machine Learning Project Template in R Photo by Jaguar MENA, some rights reserved. Working through machine learning problems from end-to-end is critically important. You can read about machine learning. You can also try out small one-off recipes. But applied machine learning will not come alive for you until you work through a dataset from beginning to end.

Considering how much significance Gartner is placing the future influence of artificial intelligence and algorithms, it comes as little surprise that the group is saying that technology will be one of the most strategic and potentially disruptive for 2017. At its Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow detailed the key technology trends for 2017 as the group sees them including how data science technologies are evolving to include advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence is helping create intelligent physical and software-based systems that are programmed to learn and adapt. Other key trends include the impact of melding of the physical and digital environments and how digital technology platforms are influencing the enterprise. "Applied AI and advanced machine learning give rise to a spectrum of intelligent implementations, including physical devices (robots, autonomous vehicles, consumer electronics) as well as apps and services (virtual personal assistants [VPAs], smart advisors), said Cearley. "These implementations will be delivered as a new class of obviously intelligent apps and things as well as provide embedded intelligence for a wide range of mesh devices and existing software and service solutions." Backing up the growing machine intelligence idea, Daryl Plummer, managing vice president, chief of research and Gartner Fellow stated that by 2020, algorithms will positively alter the behavior of more than 1 billion global workers global workers. More on Network World: Gartner: Get onboard the algorithm train! "Contextualization algorithms have advanced exponentially to include a variety of behavioral interventions such as psychology, social neuroscience and cognitive science.