Researchers see promise in AI programs

US experts say increased use of artificial intelligence inspired by how the brain recognizes patterns could lead to automated robots replacing human workers. Researchers are developing software for robots to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking, The New York Times reported Friday. "There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods," said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. "The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed." Researchers are working to improve accuracy in artificial intelligence recognition software, experts say. Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft's top scientist, has developed a computer program that recognized his words and simultaneously displayed them in English on a large screen above his head. Rashid, who oversees Microsoft's worldwide research organization, said his company's new speech recognition software makes 30 percent fewer errors than previous models but it is "still far from perfect." "Rather than having one word in four or five incorrect, now the error rate is one word in seven or eight," he wrote on Microsoft's website. Still, he said this was "the most dramatic change in accuracy" since 1979, "and as we add more data to the training we believe that we will get even better results."