Microsoft reached the human parity in conversational speech-recognition

Lately, with introduction of convolutional neural networks, everything in image and speech recognition has changed. "Deep" is a new buzz word which appears in every machine learning article concerning the vision. And thus another trend appeared when every big company has its own API for vision: Watson from IBM, Google cloud vision api, Amazon recognition, Cloudsight, Clarify and obviously also Microsoft...
 Microsoft cognitive toolkit for deep learning algorithms (Image, Speech, Text processing). https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/cognitive-toolkit/ 

They reached the human parity in conversational speech-recognition using this toolkit. http://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2016/10/18/historic-achievement-microsoft-researchers-reach-human-parity-conversational-speech-recognition/#sm.0001tnqc4913wvf0pxd6oddpkvu03 
“The next frontier is to move from recognition to understanding,” Zweig said.

In one of the next post, I will summarize the commercial and freely accessible tools for image processing, scene description and semantic segmentation.