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Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Machine Learning Astonishes

Free at the link, a short non-technical article in the latest Communications of the ACM, which describes how machine learning is taking over computing.  And how making machines learn has led to a new enthusiasm of devices, which are continually updating and discovering.   Its astonishing!

Polyglot!  By Vinton G. Cerf 

Communications of the ACM, September 2019, Vol. 62 No. 9, Page 6
10.1145/3352690     Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton G. Cerf 

Google speaks 106 languages—or at least can understand queries in written form if not also oral form. When I watch someone interacting verbally with Google Assistant in languages other than English (my native tongue), I realize Google's language ability vastly exceeds my own. I have a modest ability to speak and understand German. I know a few phrases in Russian and French. But it suddenly strikes me that Google is usefully dealing with over 100 languages in written and oral form. Assistant is responding to queries by recognizing speech input, searching the Web, and voicing the answers in multiple languages. Google Lens is translating text seen in photos into the viewer's preferred language. Google Translate is converting text and speech in one language into another with increasing quality. The quality varies, of course, depending on the volume of training material available to configure deep neural machine learning networks, but the fact that it works at all across so many languages is nothing short of astonishing and even daunting. .... "

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