Wow, to think I came to slashdot in order to have an informed discussion about Siri, the seemingly impressive voice recognition tech. Nope, all fanboys. Slashdot definitely ain't what it used to be. :-\

Its definitely a subset of AI, but if you are interested in Machine Learning then you should check out the Deep Learning Tutorials [deeplearning.net]. They cover most of the building blocks of "Deep Learning", which you can think of as the new wave of Artificial Neural Networks. The tutorials include complete theoretical (and mathematical) descriptions of the model, as well as Python/Theano implementations. Pre-requisites would be a good math background (first year calculus should suffice), basic probability theory and coding in Python/numpy. You can learn Theano as you go along.

ps: sorry for the repost, forgot to log-in beforehand.

I call shenanigans on this.

There is no way they can recognize 300 objects in real world conditions. I work in machine learning (academics) and the current record for generic object recognition sits at around 54-57% for the Caltech 101 database (contains images of 101 different objects). So basically the algorithms of the best and brightest minds in academia (LeCun, Poggio, Lowe, etc) get it wrong half the time !!

If any government officials are listening... Please don't waste our tax money on this !