What is Deep Learning? - Growth Tech News

"Alexa, what was the score of the Manchester United game yesterday?" If you've ever asked a question like that of your personal assistant device (such as Amazon Echo or Google Home), you are already enjoying the fruits of the deep learning revolution. As Ralf Herbrich, Director of Machine Learning & Managing Director of Amazon Development Germany explains, when you speak to your device, "features from a deep neural network are used to describe the audio stream in order to detect the wake-words… Once the wake-word is detected, neural networks are used to predict the sequence of phonetic states from the audio sequence of the whole microphone array." This same cutting-edge deep learning/neural network technology is already being used for a wide range of tasks, such as enabling the navigation of self-driving cars, colorizing old black-and-white films, assisting physicians in diagnosing illnesses, and beating the best human competitors at complex strategy games such as Go. But what, exactly, are deep learning and neural networks, and how do they work?