Microsoft took another step on its open-source sharing journey Monday by releasing on GitHub a toolkit it uses internally for deep learning.

Dubbed CNTK — short for Computational Network Toolkit — the open-source software is a unified deep-learning toolkit that describes neural networks as a series of computational steps via a directed graph. It’s proved significantly more efficient than Google’s TensorFlow tool and other competing tools, Microsoft said.

Microsoft has used CNTK internally to help advance speech recognition in products such as Cortana, but says it could be useful to a wide variety of other users, not just companies focused on deep learning but also those that need to process large quantities of data in real time.

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