Google wants to teach you deep learning — if you're ready that is. The tech giant has launched a free course explaining the machine learning technique that underpins so many of its services. (Google uses deep learning for everything from speech recognition to automatically sorting your photo collection.) The course is available on for-profit education site Udacity, and is estimated to take about three months to complete at a rate of six hours of work a week. It's not for absolute beginners, but aims to help established engineers and data scientists get to grips with deep learning as well as TensorFlow — the in-house machine learning software that Google open sourced last November.

Google uses deep learning techniques in apps, search, voice recognition, and more

In a blog post on Udacity, Google principal scientist Vincent Vanhoucke (the course's primary instructor) says the aim is to make deep learning more accessible. "Reading the flurry of recent popular press around deep learning, you might rightfully wonder: isn’t deep learning just a ‘Big Data’ thing? Don’t I need the computing resources of Google or Facebook to take advantage of it? As someone from industry who accidentally fell into deep learning while working on Google Voice Search just five years ago, I’ve seen how nothing can be further from the truth. At that time, I didn’t use Google’s bazillion machines to get started with deep learning: I bought a modest computer with a GPU."

So, if you're an engineer having deep dreams about deep learning, it might be worth your while signing up.

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