Deep learning was given a particularly audacious display at a conference last month in Tianjin, China, when Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft's top scientist, gave a lecture in a cavernous auditorium while a computer program recognized his words and simultaneously displayed them in English on a large screen above his head.
Then, in a demonstration that led to stunned applause, he paused after each sentence and the words were translated into Mandarin Chinese characters, accompanied by a simulation of his own voice in that language, which Dr. Rashid has never spoken.
The feat was made possible, in part, by deep-learning techniques that have spurred improvements in the accuracy of speech recognition.
Dr. Rashid, who oversees Microsoft's worldwide research organization, acknowledged that while his company's new speech recognition software made 30 percent fewer errors than previous models, it was "still far from perfect."
"Rather than having one word in four or five incorrect, now the error rate is one word in seven or eight," he wrote on Microsoft's Web site. Still, he added that this was "the most dramatic change in accuracy" since 1979, "and as we add more data to the training we believe that we will get even better results."
One of the most striking aspects of the research led by Dr. Hinton is that it has taken place largely without the patent restrictions and bitter infighting over intellectual property that characterize high-technology fields.
