In its latest version of the Android mobile operating system, Google installed a voice recognition system based on a neural network, or a computerized learning system that behaves like the human brain. The voice error rate on Android’s latest Jelly Bean is about 25 percent lower than previous versions of the software, making it far more comfortable for people to use voice commands on their devices.

“It kind of came as a surprise that we could do so much better by just changing the model,” said Vincent Vanhoucke, a Google research scientist who helped steer the effort. “It really is changing the way that people behave.”

This is just one example of the way these neural algorithms are changing technology and how people interact with their devices.

“This field of study had cooled for many years, after spending the 1980s as one of the hottest areas of research, but now it’s back, with Microsoft and IBM joining Google in exploring some very real applications,” writes Wired. “Neural networks give researchers like Vanhoucke a way analyzing lots and lots of patterns — in Jelly Bean’s case, spectrograms of the spoken word — and then predicting what a brand new pattern might represent.”

“Android takes a picture of the voice command and Google processes it using its neural network model to figure out what’s being said,” explains the article. “Google’s software first tries to pick out the individual parts of speech — the different types of vowels and consonants that make up words. That’s one layer of the neural network. Then it uses that information to build more sophisticated guesses, each layer of these connections drives it closer to figuring out what’s being said.”

These processes are being used in imaging software as well as voice recognition.

Microsoft and IBM are also working on neural algorithms. According to Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s chief research officer, “There’s much work to be done in this area. But this technology is very promising, and we hope in a few years that we’ll be able to break down the language barriers between people. Personally, I think this is going to lead to a better world.”