Microsoft is adding language enhancements, an expanded toolbox, and improved readers for text and speech to its open source Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK), a tool used to speed up advances in artificial intelligence.

CNTK 1.5 introduces a new parallelism technique known as Block Momentum, that takes training scalability to a new level of performance, while still preserving accuracy, says Chris Basoglu, Partner Engineering Manager, Microsoft Technology and Research.

Additionally, CNTK 1.5 includes a revamped I/O architecture, including more flexible readers for text and speech, says Mr. Basoglu. Microsoft has also included a library of standard components, such as Sequence-to-Sequence with Attention and Deep Residual Nets for Image Recognition.

The CNTK can be downloaded from GitHub.