Siri Will Soon Understand You a Whole Lot Better

It all started at a small academic get-together in Whistler, British Columbia. The topic was speech recognition, and whether a new and unproven approach to machine intelligence--something called deep learning--could help computers more effectively identify the spoken word. Microsoft funded the mini-conference, held just before Christmas 2009, and two of its researchers invited the world's preeminent deep learning expert, the University of Toronto's Geoff Hinton, to give a speech. Hinton's idea was that machine learning models could work a lot like neurons in the human brain. He wanted to build "neural networks" that could gradually assemble an understanding of spoken words as more and more of them arrived.