Microsoft has released its Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) deep learning engine under the MIT open source license and made the code available on GitHub. CNTK provides the artificial intelligence that powers the Cortana digital assistant and the Skype Translate app. In the past, it was available for academic use, but now all developers will be able to integrate CNTK into their own software. “We want this to be useful not just for academics but for commercial artificial intelligence and deep learning companies,” said Xuedong Huang, Microsoft’s chief speech scientist.
Other companies like Google and Facebook have released artificial intelligence engines, but Microsoft says CNTK has an advantage in that it can be used on multiple servers. In addition, it’s highly efficient and can run on Windows.
