Google has new inspiration for their software -- the human brain.
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For months, the tech company has been developing "neural networking," a technique that collects data and uses that data towards other processes, much like the neurons in the human brain do when learning something.
Now Google is ready for those networks to be used commercially.
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The company has already successfully used neural networking data for computers to recognize cats in YouTube videos. The computer itself was able to decide which features of the videos -- patterns, colors etc. -- to give importance to and then identify what it thought was a feline.
Google's next step is using neural networks to advance speech recognition technology, especially in their Android devices. Much like Apple's Siri technology, the more people use voice control, the more the artificial intelligence software can gather data to make inferences on what people are saying in different situations.
In the future, Google hopes neural networks will develop to the point that their image search tool will be able to easily understand what is appearing in a photo without relying on the photo's surrounding text.
Google has developed software similar to what neuroscientists believe exist in the visual cortex of mammals, Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal tells MIT's Technology Review.
"It turns out that the feature learning networks being used [by Google] are similar to the methods used by the brain that are able to discover objects that exist," says Bengio.
Watch the video above to learn more about neural networks.
How do you think "neural networks" can advance other parts of life? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This story originally published on Mashable here.