A method is disclosed herein that includes an act of causing a processor to receive a sample, wherein the sample is one of spoken utterance, an online handwriting sample, or a moving image sample. The method also comprises the act of causing the processor to decode the sample based at least in part upon an output of a combination of a deep structure and a context-dependent Hidden Markov Model (HMM), wherein the deep structure is configured to output a posterior probability of a context-dependent unit. The deep structure is a Deep Belief Network consisting of many layers of nonlinear units with connecting weights between layers trained by a pretraining step followed by a fine-tuning step.