Microsoft is making its Cognitive Toolkit for deep learning advances accessible to everyone. The updated version of the Toolkit is available on GitHub under an open source license and comes with an added functionality.

The new release will enable users to carry out works in the area of reinforcement learning, which is a subset of artificial intelligence.

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Microsoft claims that the updated version of the toolkit is speedier than its predecessors. The company also stated that it is more powerful than other deep learning toolkits available. It is considered to be especially efficient at processing large datasets spread across different machines. At the very same time, the toolkit can also run on a standalone laptop.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Xuedong Huang, Microsoft's chief speech scientist, said that the toolkit is superior to Tensorflow and other such frameworks. Using Microsoft's benchmarks, the toolkit was found to have surpassed its peers as well as its previous version. The toolkit offers native support for Python. It also lets developers use C++ code to the mix.

Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit is a deep learning system which has been used in various fields ranging from speech and image recognition to search relevance on CPUs and GPUs. The toolkit was earlier named CNTK, which is an acronym for Computational Network Toolkit. It was developed in-house by Microsoft researchers looking to add efficiency to their research processes.