Create your own Cortana with this toolkit

Microsoft is making the tools behind applications like Cortana available on code repository GitHub, opening the doors to new open source machine learning projects based on its software programmes. Redmond originally created the toolkit, known as Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK), out of necessity to help its developers make faster improvements to how well computers can understand speech. But in a blog post, Microsoft explained that CNTK has proved to be "more efficient" than the four notable computational toolkits – namely Theano, TensorFlow, Torch7, and Caffe – that developers were using to create deep learning applications. "The CNTK toolkit is just insanely more efficient than anything we have ever seen," said Xuedong Huang, chief speech scientist at Microsoft. This has allowed Microsoft's researchers to create systems that can accurately recognise and translate conversations, as well as ones that can recognise images and even answer questions about them.