Microsoft Solidifies CNTK Deep Learning Toolkit for Industrial-Grade AI - The New Stack

Thanks to its deep learning toolkit, Microsoft is making huge strides in computer-based speech recognition. Just this September, a Microsoft research team achieved an error rate of 6.3 percent on the Switchboard speech recognition benchmark, meaning the software interpreted just 6.3 percent of all words it "heard" incorrectly. The researchers used a recurrent neural network architecture, called long short term memory. Less than a month later, training on a 30,000-word library, they were able to get that down to the 5.9 percent -- about the same percentage of incorrect words that professional transcribers made on the same phone call recordings. It was the very first time that a computer has been able to recognize the words in a conversation as well as people can.