Deep learning applications

In the next couple of paragraphs, we will discuss how deep neural networks have applications in the field of speech recognition and computer vision, and how their application in recent years has vastly improved accuracy in these two fields by completely outperforming many other machine learning algorithms not based on deep neural networks.

Speech recognition

Deep learning has started to be used in speech recognition starting in this decade (2010 and later, see for example the 2012 article titled Deep Neural Networks for Acoustic Modeling in Speech Recognition by Hinton et al., available online at http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/38131.pdf); until then, speech recognition methods were dominated by algorithms called GMM-HMM methods (Hidden Markov Models with Gaussian Mixture Emission). Understanding speech is a complex task, since speech is not, as is naively thought, made up of separate words with clear boundaries between...