Machine-learning next level: machines teaching themselves

Can you imagine a world without the kind of voice assistant technology provided by Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri on the iPhone or Cortana for Windows? Probably not, as we tend to take such technological leaps forward pretty much for granted. But behind the scenes there's a whole new world of machine-learning that drives their collective ability to seemingly answer any question put to them. It's not so much knowing the answer that's the technological miracle – because, well, the internet – but rather that these virtual assistants are able to understand the question in the first place. Machine-learning is, in the broadest possible terms, what you might expect in that computer algorithms can be trained to understand how to correctly respond to an input by way of a human telling it what that response should be.