This approach of relying on examples — on massive amounts of data — rather than on cleverly composed rules, is a pervasive theme in modern A.I. work. It has been applied to closely related problems like speech recognition and to very different problems like robot navigation. IBM’s Watson system also relies on massive amounts of data, spread over hundreds of computers, as well as a sophisticated mechanism for combining evidence from multiple sources.
The current decade is a very exciting time for A.I. development because the economics of computer hardware has just recently made it possible to address many problems that would have been prohibitively expensive in the past. In addition, the development of wireless and cellular data networks means that these exciting new applications are no longer locked up in research labs, they are more likely to be available to everyone as services on the web.