Don't laugh: Google's Parsey McParseface is a serious IQ boost for computer smarts

Google has a big gift for anyone trying to fulfill the promise of artificial intelligence: software that helps computers understand human speech and text. The parser software, called SyntaxNet, breaks sentences down into components to better understand the meaning of words -- a boon to AI developers trying to get computers to grok natural language. SyntaxNet is now open-source software so anybody can use it for free and modify it how they want. Google did the same in 2015 with another AI technology, TensorFlow, which lets anyone link computers into a neural network that can process data in a way analogous to our own biological brains. But neural networks aren't useful until they've been trained on massive quantities of real-world data, for example by processing millions of images or listening to thousands of hours of speech.