Everyday it seems as if another breakthrough is made in tech. Another big moment, cool invention, new business use, or fun toy seems to appear out of thin air. This week, its bigger than usual.
Google, one of the internet staples has been open sourcing code and designs for some time. Open-sourcing means to share on the internet and make public to all users. While they are careful to only share relevant information that doesn’t effect their business negatively, sharing code has cemented Google as a brand of innovation, tech leadership, and knowledge. Most recently they open-sourced an important AI code. AI, or artificial intelligence, is the idea that computers and machines can be built to have the same intellect, reasoning, capabilities, and emotions as human. While AI-driven models exist, there is no true AI machine. This offering from Google is called Parsey McParseFace.
Parsey McParseFace is designed to help computers understand English. This is normally something they struggle with and developers struggle to program for. Consumers are more and more asking for computers to understand English (or any language) through Facebook bots or Siri like applications. Parsey McParseFace is important because it allows for computer to really understand a sentence in syntax. Parsing a sentence is so hard for a computer because a sentence can be structure in thousand of different ways, in different regional dialects, in slang and other colloquial language, and with synonyms. A computer can often struggle to understand the difference between them and seems to make English language a joke. That’s why Siri does not always understand a command. But according to Google’s test, Parsey McParseFace achieved a 94% accuracy rating.
Google’s open sharing of the code and software that supports it will allow for regular developers to implement that ability in their own applications. The ability to have AI based machines is a growing trend and by creating open-software for the parsing of the English language large breakthroughs have the potential to occur in other industries. This open-source can provide the spark of innovation and allow people to improve on Parsey McParseFace themselves to up the accuracy rating even further.
AI is a growing area of development and a growing sector of technology. This sharing could provide a string of breakthroughs to come. What are you’re thoughts on AI? Send them to us via Twitter or Facebook!