Originally posted here, where you can see all the graphics. There has been much in the news lately about the next wave of MT technology driven by a technology called deep learning and neural nets (DNN). I will attempt to provide a brief layman's overview about what this is, even though I am barely qualified to do this (but if Trump can run for POTUS then surely my trying to do this is less of a stretch). Please feel free to correct me if I have inadvertently made errors here. Traditional AI methods of language understanding depended on embedding rules of language into a system, but in the Google SmartReply project, as with all modern machine learning, the system was fed enough data to learn on its own, just as a child would.