<p>You have to keep in mind that TensorFlow is, as far as the user is concerned, "just" a machine learning API. People may happen to use it for image classification - the 2017 Dev Summit showed medical use cases in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toK1OSLep3s" rel="nofollow noreferrer">skin cancer detection</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOeZ7IgEN4o" rel="nofollow noreferrer">retinal imaging</a> - but <em>all</em> the topics of supervised and unsupervised machine learning are candidates for TensorFlow, just like they are for any other ML library; regression of sales by advertisement budget, clustering of users in a social network and recommending books based on previous purchases via collaborative filtering, just to name a few.</p>

<p>If you heard about the recent self-driving car projects, think about obtaining steering wheel and brake control commands from a live camera feed. NVIDIA had <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07316" rel="nofollow noreferrer">a paper on it</a>, for example.</p>

<p>One rather interesting use case are <a href="https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/seq2seq" rel="nofollow noreferrer">sequence to sequence models</a> to transform one arbitrary sequence of inputs to another one; according to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIR_-Xlbp7s" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this video</a>, Google Translate might be taking advantage of it on the phone. If you're thinking of image and video retrieval, sequence labelling is another topic, where you train a network to describe, in human words, the content of a video. Or even natural language processing, where you try to determine the <em>concepts</em> within written text.</p>

<p>There are also papers <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.09460" rel="nofollow noreferrer">like this</a> describing the usage of recurrent models like LSTMs for energy usage prediction (Note the paper isn't specific to TensorFlow, but LSTMs are part of the core library).  <a href="http://de.slideshare.net/TaegyunJeon1/electricity-price-forecasting-with-recurrent-neural-networks" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Here</a> are slides on electricity price forecasting with TensorFlow, if you're interested in it.</p>
Apart from image and sound recognition, what are real-world use cases for Tensorflow?
<p>When I look at tensorflow, I find lots of cool stuff I can geek out over, but I haven't been able to figure out anywhere that I would use it in the real world.  Google didn't spend a gajillion dollars on it without seeing real world applications.</p>

<p>There are lots of cool tutorials on how to build cool stuff with Tensorflow, but they start with the assumption that you are already fluent in their dialect of "greek without an R" and can extrapolate business usecases from a demo of recognizing a handwritten letter e in a fixed size cell.</p>

<p>I have built demonstration neural networks in pascal, C, C++, and Java at different times, so I have some grasp of the principles.  Is is possible to express this in a manner that an old-style Pascal guy who has dabbled i nthe underlying technology a bit can grasp? </p>