Word2Vec is a two-layer neural network that processes texts and turns them into numerical features. This way, the output of the Word2Vec is a vocabulary in which each word is embedded in vector space. The resulting vector can then be fed into a neural network for better understanding of natural languages. The novelist EL Doctorow has expressed this idea quite poetically in his book Billy Bathgate:
"It's like numbers are language, like all the letters in the language are turned into numbers, and so it's something that everyone understands the same way. You lose the sounds of the letters and whether they click or pop or touch the palate, or go ooh or aah, and anything that can be misread or con you with its music or the pictures it puts in your mind, all of that is gone, along with the accent, and you have a new understanding...