After watching this, your brain will not be the same Lara Boyd TEDxVancouver - Duration: 14:25.

Today we're going to talk about how computers understand speech and speak themselves. As computers play an increasing role in our daily lives there has been an growing demand for voice user interfaces, but speech is also terribly complicated. Vocabularies are diverse, sentence structures can often dictate the meaning of certain words, and computers also have to deal with accents, mispronunciations, and many common linguistic faux pas. The field of Natural Language Processing, or NLP, attempts to solve these problems, with a number of techniques we'll discuss today. And even though our virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, Google Home, Bixby, and Cortana have come a long way from the first speech processing and synthesis models, there is still much room for improvement.

So we've talked a lot in this series about how computers fetch and display data, but how do they make decisions on this data? From spam filters and self-driving cars, to cutting edge medical diagnosis and real-time language translation, there has been an increasing need for our computers to learn from data and apply that knowledge to make predictions and decisions. This is the heart of machine learning which sits inside the more ambitious goal of artificial intelligence. We may be a long way from self-aware computers that think just like us, but with advancements in deep learning and artificial neural networks our computers are becoming more powerful than ever. Want to know more about Carrie Anne? https://about.me/carrieannephilbin

So we've talked a lot in this series about how computers fetch and display data, but how do they make decisions on this data? From spam filters and self-driving cars, to cutting edge medical diagnosis and real-time language translation, there has been an increasing need for our computers to learn from data and apply that knowledge to make predictions and decisions. This is the heart of machine learning which sits inside the more ambitious goal of artificial intelligence. We may be a long way from self-aware computers that think just like us, but with advancements in deep learning and artificial neural networks our computers are becoming more powerful than ever. Want to know more about Carrie Anne? https://about.me/carrieannephilbin