Katrina Rippel is a careful speaker who follows all the rules. Hao Chen is a more freewheeling conversationalist. And I'm a nonstop troublemaker, constantly blurting out whatever notions pass through my head. On a recent morning, the three of us met in cyberspace to find out how well (or poorly) we could communicate in a mixture of German, Mandarin, and English. Each of us spoke only our native language.

Google Translate is getting brainier. The online translation tool recently started using a neural network to translate between some of its most popular languages – and the system is now so clever it can do this for language pairs on which it has not been explicitly trained. To do this, it seems to have created its own artificial language. Traditional machine-translation systems break sentences into words and phrases, and translate each individually. In September, Google Translate unveiled a new system that uses a neural network to work on entire sentences at once, giving it more context to figure out the best translation.

SAN FRANCISCO--We are already living with deep learning and large-scale neural networks, as evidenced by the growing number of applications that rely on computer vision, language understanding, and robotics. In a keynote talk, Dean outlined the history of machine learning (ML) and neural networks and various ways to program models to take advantage of raw data coming through in the form of images or audio. Dean pointed to Google--s speech recognition team, which through the use of neural networks reduced word errors by 30%. The team used the networks to replace the acoustic model of its speech recognition pipeline -- which uses raw audio waveforms to determine sounds and words -- and achieved --the biggest single improvement in two decades.-- The fundamental problems being solved by ML and neural networks can be found in other fields such as medical and satellite imaging.

Machine translation (MT) was one of the first applications of artificial intelligence technology that was deployed to solve real-world problems. In the late 1990s, Ford Vehicle Operations began working with Systran Software Inc. to adapt and customize its machine-translation technology in order to translate Ford's vehicle assembly build instructions from English to German, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese. The assembly build instructions at Ford contain text written in a controlled language as well as unstructured remarks and comments. The MT system has already translated more than 7 million instructions into these languages and is an integral part of the overall manufacturing process-planning system used to support Ford's assembly plants in Europe, Mexico and South America.