Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B(axios.com) |
Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B(axios.com) |
Pinterest went from ~$250m revenue / quarter to tripling that in just 2 quarters. That's huge and unexpected that revenue would climb that high.
In English, there are quite a few contenders for TTS, eg. Amazon. Apple can find another vendor. But in some languages it is Google voice or Nuance and there are no other games in town.
Here you have been carefully exercising your stock options every month so you can pay only long-term capital gains taxes, and avoid AMT, and then BAM! sorry, you just sold it all at once. "BZZZT. Sucker."
They have also had a boost in stock with covid and more people using remote speech services
> October 18, 2005 — the company changed its name to Nuance Communications, Inc.
So Nuance was worth ~$220MM at the time of acquisition. I'm sure it's worth a lot more now but ScanSoft acquired like 50 other companies too, including old voice recording giant Dictaphone.
It seems Microsoft is still actively continuing to buy more companies and it seems Discord is still on the menu.
Microsoft's influence is growing deeply...
Microsoft got done for this before (bundling Internet Explorer with Windows) and if you look at where they are now buying out businesses and using dark patterns in Windows 10 to make people use Edge as well as implying it is a fundamental part of the OS they are way beyond was acceptable years ago.
That is the last speech recognition engine I would ever want to buy.
They've been abusing their position and power for years now and the Edge situation with Windows 10 is getting much worse after the Chromium update. They force you to use the said browser with some features, like when you use the search function it automatically opens Edge browser, even if you have another browser set as default. What's next? Removing the option to set defaults for browsers?
It's one of the reasons I'm willing to buy a MacBook next...
I'm referring to the various overtures between MS and Canonical lately, a lot of collaboration going on. https://pulse.microsoft.com/en/transform-en/na/fa2-canonical...
I don't think it would be the end of desktop Linux but it would mean a focus away from the core principles of Linux (which Canonical was not really that good at following anyway).
The issue with Windows is 30+ years of legacy cruft and APIs that are all bundled in, mostly in user-space. Needed for backward compatibility which how Microsoft won and keeps the “enterprise” market.
“We are very pleased with the strong start to the fiscal year, as we delivered revenue and EPS above our guidance range expectations,” said Mark Benjamin, Chief Executive Officer at Nuance. “We continued to advance our strategic initiatives, accelerating our cloud transition across our core platforms in Healthcare and focusing on our AI-first approach in Enterprise. In Healthcare, we saw solid performance in our cloud-based offerings, growing cloud revenue 28% year-over-year. In particular, we benefited from strong performance in Dragon Medical & DAX Cloud revenue, which grew 22% year-over-year driven by the ongoing transition of our installed base to Dragon Medical One, as well as traction in international, ambulatory and community hospital markets. Enterprise delivered another record revenue quarter, up slightly from its previous record in Q1'20, driven by particularly strong demand for our Security & Biometrics solutions."
Nuance has deep relationships built with nearly every health system in the US and beyond. This fits quite well with Microsoft's corporate focus. Yes, Nuance also has a lot of IP, but I wouldn't expect any consumer facing changes (e.g. Cortana) in the near term.
[1] https://investors.nuance.com/download/EX%2099.1%20Press%20Re...
Dragon has been around for 23 years and has been THE product for VR in the medical field for at least the last 10 years (from my experience).
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/business/goldman-sachs-an...
At the time, Hound actually was very very good at language recognition and impressed everyone quite a bit. Compared to Nuance, the experience of conversing with Hound was better as I remember. However, Nuance had the edge in language support... while Hound was great for Western dialects of English, and some others, Nuance supported Mandarin. End of the day it was no contest which product we had to go with.
I'm not surprised that Nuance had continued to be an industry leader all these years.
...
[0] https://cloudsolutions.comcast.com/apps/64168/office-365#!ov...
And 100% agreed, the voice is great on the Xfinity remote. Was very impressed.
The most successful companies have lots of cash, high share prices, and amazing cash cows. They could borrow for (almost) free, so resources are practically unlimited. Their R&D is already well funded. Most of their big, growth oriented endeavours are not cash-constrained. There are usually no factories to build or production to scale up.
Google tried "20% time." They tried "let many flowers grow." Those things seemed ambitious at 2007-scale. In 2021 terms... new flowers need to be S&P 500 companies to represent growth, instead of just clutter. "Meaningful growth," for Alphabet, is a big number.
How else does a MSFT, Google or (especially) FB put $20bn to work? Acquiring "just works."
Of course, there are in-house alternatives. Waymo is an in-house investment by Alphabet that's bigger than this Nuance acquisition... especially if you consider the $bns Waymo will continue to need until some unknown future date. Self driving is looking more hopeful (certainly to investors) than it was when waymo started.... but waymo is still a dubious investment.
Consider that Google could have bought any car company, for about as much as waymo will cost eventually. Car companies have loans, so you could quibble the math... but details.
Acquiring is easy. The path of least resistance wins >50% of the time. We have that dynamic here, both in the human/managers sense and in the arbitrage-like incentives in the market currently.
It feels (anecdata) that Siri is doing a bit better on voice to tex when sending messages but much worse on simple commands like “turn off living room lights”.
>Reports suggest it's in advanced talks with gaming chat app Discord for a deal worth more than $10 billion.
>A report in February suggested Microsoft was eyeing a takeover of Pinterest, worth $53 billion on the public market. Last September, it bought gaming giant ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion.
Microsoft is in full yolo mode since all other big tech companies have antitrust lawsuit against them. Microsoft spent its time on the cross in the 1990s and early 2000s now they will acquire anything they can.
Microsoft's first acquisition was in 1987 of Forethought Inc. or developers of what is now Microsoft PowerPoint and they bought them for only $14m. Today PowerPoint as a product and as a brand is worth billions.
I had no idea they had enough sales to justify a $20 billion valuation. Though to be fair, Microsoft tends to acquire companies at high price tags (eg, Skype, LinkedIn, Minecraft) compared to eg, Apple's acquisition strategy of smaller technology focused companies (other than Beats headphones) like P.A. Semi and PrimeSense.
EDIT: Other comments say Nuance's patent portfolio may greatly contribute to its valuation.
Note: everyone is getting this acquisition wrong. It's not about Dragon and their Speech-to-Tex. This is all about owning an enterprise Communication Platform (e.g. Contact Center, etc).
I'll repost my previous comment from the other HN thread below:
----
Everyone is wanting to take on Twilio. Last September, Microsoft first announced their Communication Cloud.
A huge focus at Twilio now is moving upstream to the Call Center, where Nuance is a significant player. So Microsoft picking up Nuance makes sense.
It’s clear Microsoft sees communication services as a strategic core part of their business.
(Even at the consumer / gamer level with the rumored Discord acquisition talks)
https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/22/microsoft-challenges-twili...
Well then we can expect Microsoft to swoop in for Twilio any year now.
And given that Jeff Lawson, is both he founder and CEO of TWLO - it's not entirely clear he would sell (unless the number is just so high, he has the fiduciary requirement that he has too - in which case I assume that would be north of $100B+)
But with regards to big acquisitions, MS is ironically and quite surprisingly able to fly under the radar in terms of antitrust. Literally every other tech company is not.
I got to meet a lot of the people involved at other companies in the project, including the Jim and Janet Baker, who founded Dragon, and many people at Intel up to and including Andy Grove. It was remarkable that he took interest in what was a relatively small project that was also distant from Intel's core products. I also met Jo Lernout, the L in L&H, which played a role in subsequent tragic events for the Bakers.
All those people, and most of the technologies from those days, are gone now. Dragon ended up a part of Nuance, which itself had been called ScanSoft, and, before that, was a part of Xerox that, if I recall correctly, was acquired by Xerox from Ray Kurzweil.
ScanSoft became a roll-up of a large number of speech technology companies. One of them was Nuance, and the roll-up was rebranded Nuance. Another acquisition was L&H, which had collapsed due to a financial scandal, which blew up after L&H had acquired Dragon. The Bakers got screwed and sued Goldman, who did the L&H deal. They lost.
And that is your capsule history of Nuance. Sorry to give short shrift to the acquired companies I have no firsthand knowledge of.
I believe the real story of Microsoft buying Nuance is that Nuance owns an enormous number of patents.
Top comment as I'm writing this says Nuance has a strong presence in the healthcare device market, but I'd be surprised if that alone was worth the purchase price.
Also, if you cannot operate a keyboard and must communicate by speech to operate a computer, it's pretty much Dragon NaturallySpeaking or GTFO. Integrating NaturallySpeaking tech into Windows would be a huge boon and further cement Windows as the os to have if you have disabilities.
Is there really a lot of NLP IP hidden behind corporate walls at this point? I just assumed Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, etc were all using the same model architectures. Genuine question, can anyone shed some light?
Is there a way to make the others "conversational" if not, is Zoe the best example?
Did you find any competing product that came close?
Thank you
Lots of amazing open source out there but the difference between 90% accuracy and 99.7% accuracy can be very difficult to obtain.
Not to mention, quantified data sets, especially medical ones, can hold immense value.
pointless story aside, their enterprise valuation at the time was a little under 20% of what it is today, and the company remained mostly the same until 2 years ago. wonder what the catalyst was for their 5x valuation growth?
At the time of acquisition:
Nuance: $20B, employee strength 6000. 3M/employee
LinkedIn: 26B, employee strength ~12000. 2M/employee
LinkedIn was much more larger, more 'visible' and perhaps better talent attractor than Nuance at the time of acquisition.
It felt weird reading 'Moby Dick' to a computer for an hour , but at the time there was no product that could even get near Dragon in any performance metric.
Since natural language interpretation is such a widely used concept now I had taken it for granted that Dragon even existed anymore.
I don't know much about the company, and I don't know much about the product anymore, but that kind of persistence and consistency in this field is admirable.
Any ideas on why that is?
DragonDictate / Dragon NaturallySpeaking, that's why it sounded so familiar.
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It does have the advantage that you can "spin off" your acquisitions once they fail to do anything interesting (though this is more commonly seen in sunset industries/dying companies (see AOL, Compaq, etc)).
I agree, but I think MSFT (and friends) are in this predicament no matter what. What's the alternative?
That said, I don't really think BRK is the end game.
For one thing, Berkshire is kind of an exception. There are plenty of smaller conglomerates that are actually like Berkshire, but most pretend not to be conglomerates. They pretend to be far more cohesive & synergetic than Berkshire.
Also, Alphabet shows that synergies can be easy to find. Youtube, Android... This generation's acquisitions need to be 10X bigger than that. But... these companies are in uncharted waters. No company has wielded free resources at the scale that MSFT now operates. They aren't the only one currently, but they don't have predecessors... unless we go back to VOC or somesuch.
OTOH... Satya is accidentally in the same position Buffet intentionally sought: Sitting on a pile of capital that must be allocated.
But overall, yes. I can think of so many large-scale acquisitions that didn't go so swimmingly.
- AOL/Time-Warner
- Ford/its stable of luxury brands like Jaguar and Land Rover
- Compaq/HP
- Daimler/Chrysler
You don’t need to hunt new customers with a marketing plan; you likely already have customers with these needs in your pipeline so it’s a matter of making sure your AEs know what’s happening. Everything is simpler at scale in a cloud business model, which is why these 3 companies in particular are eating the world.
You mean Berkshire Hathaway, that's current market cap is ~$615B and hails arguably one of the most successful investors of all time as its CEO? That Berkshire?
I don't know about you, but I'd happily be just 1/100th as successful as how that model turned out.
2/3 of those arguably are among the most important parts of their respective companies
Simple things like:
"Remind me to X tomorrow at 9am" "Add Y to the shopping list" "Remind me to do Z when I get home"
This is the only way I do reminders now and it's great. It's especially useful while driving, or when I'm in bed nearly asleep and remember something, I can just tell Siri without having to get up and use my phone.
And as far as smart home controls, being able to say "Siri, turn all the lights on" or "Siri, turn the heater on" without having to stop what I'm doing and walk around the house flicking switches is really nice.
Assistants provide a very noticeable QoL improvement for me in many aspects. I think that's more than most other products on the market can say. And that's not even touching on the lives saved from not having to use your phone while driving.
For me, speech recognition and assistants, along with software like Todoist, are able to keep me far more functional than I would be otherwise.
Salty, but I think I agree.
It seems that with AI/ML, choosing/defining your problem well is hugely important. Text to speech, even computer generated natural language is a definite enough task that engineers (and machines) have the feedback to make progress.
In fact I'd say Apple is just keeping spending money instead of shutting it down. When IBM Watson AI sank like turd in market it cut funding and let most of team go. I think Apple doing same might be more sensible.
Microsoft is making a intervention with things purchase the way I see it.
What they have to do is provide a Linux version or at least O365 interop as good with Edge for Linux as Windows.
Nuance support and products are hopeless - my subscription for $120/yr stopped working with ios14 and the app refused to send password reset emails and then we discovered that no online account management existed and cancelled instead of relying on 8/5/300 telephone queuing.
"Hey Siri, make a Facetime call to Bob Smith." "Which Bob Smith would you like to call? bobsmith@icloud.com or bobsmith@me.com?
How at this point does Siri not have even the most basic of logic to know that it's literally the same person. That's Apple's OWN service.
Usual Apple reliance on their fans buying their devices no matter how bad the software is.
I'm indeed also a bit surprised that this hasn't progressed. It's still not possible to say things like "Turn on my living room lights and the hallway as well". It still feels very scripted where you have to say things exactly the right way and in bite-sized chunks to make it work. The same with Alexa by the way.
I've noticed it's been misunderstanding my girlfriend more and more over the past few months (she has a slight accent to her English, but nothing remotely difficult to understand), and lately it's started misunderstanding simple things that I say too. For example if I have Netflix paused and say "hey google, resume", 30% of the time it will give me search results for how to write a résumé instead of unpausing Netflix. I've had the Google Home for a few years now, and that literally has never happened before now. To get it to work reliably, I have to instead say "resume playback" or "resume chromecast".
Google's online advice is whenever the assistant fails to work just retrain the device. I remain skeptical that's the issue because it's not like my way of speaking has changed. Instead I have just switched to a new way to request what I need since reporting the issue via Google's vaunted customer service process seems likely to fail.
I've used both Siri and Alexa daily for many years, and used to rag on Siri a lot. In my experience Siri has caught up to Alexa on most fronts, and I find them more or less interchangeable my common use cases (home automation, timers/alarms, music, news/weather summaries, etc.).
That's not saying much since the Alexa bar is quite low. But like many Apple products, I'd characterize Siri's improvements as "slow and steady" for almost a decade now.
It feels like it does better in edge cases at the expense of the main cases.
Siri is way more than a pure voice "assistant".
Hopefully Microsoft will eventually unify these apis and configurations into something coherent.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/with-azure-percept-microsoft-...
Which is to say, the blog doesn't make it sound like I can use this without an Azure subscription, even if it works offline sometimes. Whereas the Microsoft Speech SDK, I could just include the DLL files and run with it.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/sp...
I believe Google Cloud Platform has something similar available (not sure about AWS).
They also bought up a lot of small companies and products from bigger companies and own a lot of patents.
For example, they've done all the work to get that same software certified healthcare grade and convinced lots of hospitals to adopt it for their doctors. They can sell that for a lot more than they sell the essentially same software to you.
If you go to a corporate website and see an "Industries" section with Healthcare, Telecommunications, Finance, Government, and more you know they're good at this sort of rent-seeking.
If so imagine them sales...
When Siri's ancestor was being worked on at SRI, it used a cousin of Nuance for the speech part. The PI of the virtual assistant piece of that program spun it out as a separate company, and was immediately snarfed up by Apple.
At that time, they switched speech recognition providers; but I don't know if Apple picked Nuance specifically.
This is the text from Skype’s terms: “Notwithstanding any rights or obligations governed by the Additional Terms (as defined below) if, at any time you choose to upload or post User Submissions to the Skype Websites or through the Software (excluding Reports and excluding the content of your communications) you automatically grant Skype a non-exclusive, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual, sub-licensable and transferable license of all rights to use, edit, modify, include, incorporate, adapt, record, publicly perform, display, transmit and reproduce the User Submissions including, without limitation, all trade marks associated therewith, in connection with the Skype Websites and Skype’s Software and Products including for the purpose of promoting or redistributing part or all of the Skype Websites and/or the Software or Products, in any and all media now known or hereafter devised. You also hereby grant each user of the Skype Website and/or Skype’s Software or Products a non-exclusive license to access your User Submission through the Skype Website and/or Software or Products and to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, perform and transmit such User Submissions solely as permitted through the functionality of the Skype Websites and/or Software or Products and pursuant to these Terms of Use. In addition, you waive any so-called “moral rights” in and to the User Submissions, to the extent permitted by applicable law.”
I can believe this ToU for the former.
I'd be surprised if there is any real difference in how either company respects your privacy (neither does). But for the most part, google seems to do its thing in the background and leave you alone. Microsoft is constantly popping things up asking you to rate this or that, flinging things you didn't ask for onto your screen, basically the spirit of clippy reborn into modern data collection practices. If I'm going to have my information exploited no matter what I do, I'd rather at least have it happen unobtrusively.
(To be fair, this is just my perception. I was in a g-suite shop for three years and now onto office 365 and I feel like it bothers me about stuff way more often the g-suite ever did)
I personally am more Microsoft friendly, simply for the reason that they always had and have an open platform to everyone.
I'm honestly interested in people's experiences and views on this topic.
The only reason Microsoft is trending back to "open" is they failed when they imitated Apple.
Apparently you missed a few decades of their development of the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" tactics.
As well as their tendency to throw exorbitant licensing conditions on nearly everything they sold.
As well as their repeated backdoor deals and maneuvers to cause vendor lock in across the entire PC market.
gov-uk-list: https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2018/09/27/assistive-techn...
nvda-announcement: https://www.afb.org/aw/19/4/15104
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/business/goldman-sachs-cl...
MSFT isn't shy from making large purchases unlike Amazon and Apple: They take such massive bets comparatively frequently.
Let's say there is a business that is successful and generating $10B in revenue and $1B in profit and valued at $15B market cap.
Now you want to buy it.
Historically, you will have to pay something like a 40% premium to its market value in order to acquire it. So you will pay $21B ($15B * 1.4) to own this company.
If you "just do nothing," then the company will presumably still generate $10B in revenue and $1B in profit (and really still be "worth" $15B).
So, you paid $21B for something worth $15B, making the shareholders of the selling company very happy and the shareholders of your company sad.
As a CEO, this is a good way to lose your job.
Effectively, you are forced to present (and attempt to execute) a plan for how the combined business either generates more revenue or has lower costs than the two companies did separately in order to get your board's approval on behalf of your shareholders.
Basically every new goddamn trend that is allowed to occur is about how datasets can be compiled from such marketed options.
That's why we don't have first-class convergence devices yet. It'd likely blend our home and mobile usage profiles too much.
And a command that worked yesterday may not work today. (Gah!)
(My wife has been using Dragon for dictation heavily lately, so that's a use-case that is intriguing to me as well, especially if today's announcement means the death of the Dragon product line in the near future.)
-set alarm -next song -set timer -set reminder (e.g. "Siri set reminder 6pm close garage door") -send message to <person>
These comprise 99% of what I would want it to do, and it does it marvelously.
Ah, if there only was a way to disable it fully. Even when I disable Siri, it still randomly decides to call people when I boil a pot of rice
Consider Google. They acquired Youtube, Android... Google's skillset was perfect for taking these proving concepts and making them 1080px, so to speak. Now, Youtube and android feed users & data to the adwords cash machine. Youtube and android defend the adwords castle, denying competitors. Fantastic synergy.
OTOH, no company will ever find a synergy with ebay. They have spiky bits where companies are supposed to have copulation bits.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/cheaper-bandwidth-or...
Also, "just give it as much resources as it needs, we're rich" was a game google had already proved willing to win with gmail.
It's easy to lay the tactic out in retrospect. Fund "resource hogs" that users don't pay for. Bet on long term bandwidth costs going down. Bet on major consumer monopolies being valuable, long term. Sounds great and it was great.
OTOH, lets pour $mns into a "business" that we bought for $bns, that has no revenue... because in 15 years we will be worth $trns and it will all sound like peanuts... this was once considered imprudent business planning. Google were willing to do it. Others weren't. Only a few even could.
> SRI spun off market leader Nuance Communications to commercialize the technology
https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-president-of-sri-ventures-on-bri...
It's a bit like Symantec, which bought everything, including its name.
Returning money to shareholders is the common solution for when you don't know how to grow more and profitability in the businesses you're already in and don't have any particular advantage in entering new ones. I'm not saying that's what they should be doing but sitting on a pile of capital that you don't know what to do with isn't a new problem that we need to invent new solutions for.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-money-poured-stocks-past...
Also, IDK if it is a common solution. Nothing is really common at MSFT-scale. A free cash flow like Google, Alphabet, etc. is almost unprecedented.
Meanwhile, I do actually think that this is better for shareholders. IMO "Synergies" is a term somewhere between euphemism and a boomerism but for the purpose of "shareholder value" it doesn't matter. At Monopoly/Unicorn/FAANG scale, there are big opportunities for synergy. Think Google-Android.
Why is Nuance being owned by Alphabet less efficient than being traded independently or owned by private investors? Why is Alphabet owning vanguard more efficient than owning Nuance?
The answer to those question can have no actual impact on reality. If the acquired business is cash generative, they can left to their devices. If the parent company doesn't borrow, then "efficiency" never becomes explicit. Explicit efficiency is relative to cost of borrowing. Implicit efficiency is implied by share prices... and at this point things get foggy.
Well, they can just stop growing, and continue doing what works. If that thing stops working (or they have a good belief that it will stop working before too long), they have two options: 1) do nothing, and gradually wind the company down and return capital to shareholders so they can reinvest it elsewhere, or 2) pivot, and accept that the things they are pivoting to will be a rounding error in their finances for years while they grow.
Obviously this is disastrous in our current economic system; a company that tried this would watch its stock price fall into the toilet before too long. But absent that, why not?
Consolidation is what will bring us to a corporate-run dystopia. I would much rather the world be filled mostly with small and medium sized businesses, with every market open to a lot of competition and even cooperation (on standards, not on prices). But I know, that's just a pipe dream, and humans generally suck at cooperation when money is involved.
lol
>> Consolidation is what will bring us to a corporate-run dystopia. I would much rather the world be filled mostly with small and medium sized businesses...
The alternative to that is trust busting, perhaps. I was commenting on the market logic, so to speak. If we're optimistic, maybe it'll be a corporate-run utopia. Zuck's not great, but I think this generation is kinder than the Carnegie/Rockefeller days.
Look... if Bezos, Zuck, and such continue on trend, they'll soon be very rich. Bigger than the Rockefeller. Their companies will be one par with the VOC/EIC in terms of market cap, but I don't know if it's really comparable to that.
Google/FB are sketchy, if trust-busting comes into play. Advertising is sensitive to both regulation and trustbusting. A ban on snooping, manipulation and overly vigorous advertising would hurt advertising. Trust-busting, like separating adwords from google, hurts advertising monopolies too.
Meanwhile, what happens if a regulator messes up and breaks FB? Would the world lack for social messaging media? If Ford stops making cars, fewer cars are made in the world. If fewer FB likes happen, more sploosh sploshes happen and all is well in the world...
More likely though, no help is coming. That being the case, I think the tech bros aren't the worst candidates for trillionaire status. Someone had to be it. I'm glad it isn't the real estate bros.
The report in which the organization explains why Microsofts products are privacy invading, monopolized or otherwise breaching some law or regulation, that report itself is most probably written on those Microsoft products.
Now: Nuance was spun off of SRI probably a decade or more before Siri was birthed in a Darpa program called CALO. CALO may have, in some implementations, used EduSpeak or it's lightweight cousin, Dynaspeak. But I'm pretty sure that when Siri was ALSO spun-off from SRI, and bought by Apple, that Apple did not want to pay the license fee for the EduSpeak code. So they used something else (which, AFAIR; was an Apple-confidential matter).
I don't see how the GP is incorrect. But I also don't see how MS could improve anything here.
The user was incorrect because they said, "anything you discussed via Skype granted to MS a worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, etc. license to anything mentioned" in the context of their parent comment that said, "now they will be able to listen what you talk about. Where is this going?" These terms have nothing to do with listening to your conversations and they don't grant any rights to them.
That's not to say Microsoft won't ask for such licensing in the future.
This is a demo of Conformer in Talon: https://twitter.com/lunixbochs/status/1378159234861264896
Personally I think they should've been acquired a decade ago.
Obviously Nuance is more than just speech recognition, but still not sure why people are downplaying how good they were at it.
EDIT: or maybe it's just too prohibitively expensive for people outside of medical/legal fields to know about? And don't get me wrong, I love that things like Talon Voice are widely available for hands free coding, I just hope this means NaturallySpeaking will supplant Windows Dictation.
This is survivorship bias at its finest.
How about Facebook's acquisition of Instagram? Google's acquisition of YouTube? Android? DoubleClick? Amazon's acquisition of Twitch? I could go on.
For the record, yes there are VERY many acquisitions that go wrong, especially when you get to the $B+ value. The parent's characterization seems in line with the "no one ever got fired for using IBM" and that sentiment is grossly unjustified for M&A. There are a bunch of other factors that go into corporate strategy. One example - buying a competitor to eliminate competition and thus protecting future dollars.
These examples are not comparable to what the OP was saying, e.g AOL/Time-Warner, Compaq/HP are mergers of giants with lot of employees.
BoA/Merrill Lynch
Shell/Royal Dutch
Sanofi/Avantis
Glaxo/SmithKline
P&G/Gillette
Roche/Genetech
Exxon/Mobil
Conoco/Philips
Disney/Fox
AT&T has had so many successful mergers that the government has basically had to split them up every time because it made them into a monopoly.
Should I go on?
EDIT: PS - DoubelClick in 2007 was considered "BIG". It had 1200 employees and was bought for $3.1B. Which was A LOT at the time.
Can anyone contextualize the horse trading that led to that?
>September 2005, eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion.
In September 2009, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board announced the acquisition of 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from eBay.
Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion.
And, let's not forget, NeXT.
Probably one of the best U$400 something million ever spent.
In contrast, while I'm sure Beats has easily paid for itself, $3B was not exactly cheap, and the results were not 10x PA Semi.
Siri is unaware of so many things.
A simple command that would actually be useful (but fails totally):
« Siri, remind me to buy milk the next time I go get groceries. »
And even then... I should not have to mention the part about « groceries ». The request should be perfectly understood with a full stop after the word « milk » and a reminder should pop up automatically whenever I am in a grocery (any grocery).
An even better Siri would also be able to a categorize things properly. For example, if later in the day I say « Siri, I will need chicken, butter, salt and cardamom for my next recipe », Siri should automatically add those to the « milk » next time I go to the grocery.
I've used Alexa since it came out and they've added annoying random suggestions over the years that you were able to turn off in various settings menus.
But in the past year or Alexa has been upselling me stuff or randomly telling me about features I don't want to hear about when I'm just trying to turn on a light. And it seems like there's now actually no way to turn this stuff off.
Does anyone know if you can turn off Alexa upselling or is it going to just be a part of having a smart home forever?
I'm believe the most valid use of AI/ML is to perform tasks that people either cannot currently do, or cannot easily do. For example, ai-based up-scaling of old video game pre-renders. It's not really feasible for a person to do this well, unless you simply rebuild everything with a team of artists. And you could argue that up-scaling images for a video game is trivial, since all video games are trivial. But, the point is that the task at hand requires the help of a computer, whereas a to-do list, or using a light switch does not.
1. In bed, all ready to fall asleep, you get up to get your notebook from your desk to add the reminder to your notebook.
2. Cooking with hands all messy, you wash your hands, dry them, go to your desk to add the reminder to your notebook.
3. Driving at 40mph, so you pull over in a parking lot, take out your notebook from your bag and add the reminder.
Yeah, I will take telling Google assistant to do this instead.
2. Don't get so messy when cooking, also it hardly matters if your temporary notebook gets a bit dirty.
3. Don't multitask when driving. Taking your eyes off the road is the main concern, but testing has shown driver's voice control systems to be distracting to a significant degree. And, voice assistants are at least somewhat similar.
A todo entry or flipping lights via assistants also qualify as such tasks, if we broaden the definition of "easy". The flow from having the thought of an idea or a song to making a note or playing the song by just speaking out loud is just so convenient, without having to context switch from whatever one is doing. Controlling a set of IoT devices with custom commands is another good usecase.
Of course, not everyone has a workflow where a digital assistant fits well today. However, I expect that their usefulness will increase exponentially with time. We're surely heading to the sci-fi future where each house will have a personalized digital guardian responding to the wishes of the family, Jarvis style, no?
Obviously accents and irregularities are also areas I'm sure they are focusing on, but I imagine that optimizing for real time, mobile and low CPU power devices is a huge focus for them.
However, after Siri was sold to Apple, I don't think that they retained the EduSpeak portion for speech-to-text. (I honestly don't know - but it seems to me it did not; I don't think Apple wanted to pay that license fee to SRI).
"Xfinity Home, dim the bathroom lights to 40%"
"Youtube Yuri Gagarin"
Are both things it knows how to execute.
> Obviously Nuance is more than just speech recognition, but still not sure why people are downplaying how good they were at it.
Because nuance wasn't very good.. at least in all the benchmarks I've seen. It's been a while since I compared numbers it's possible they've improved a lot. They're also known for kinda being dicks with the contracts they offer in B2B.
Human memory is terrible and should be relied upon as infrequently as possible.
And while I'm ranting... the thing I hate most of about all of these services is they don't have a profanity mode. In the privacy of my own home I have AN EFFIN' HUGE POTTY MOUTH. I love to curse. I LOVE IT. The fact that I can't get one of these services to talk to me like a middle school student is extremely disappointing. I don't want to be politically correct when I'm talking to a virtual assistant in a private setting. I want to say "Hey goognizzle, are there any good mother f***ing movies opening near me this weekend?" and get Samuel L. Jackson style "Here's the mother f***ing movies opening on mother f***ing Friday at the 5 mother f***ing theaters closest to mother f***ing you."*
Edit: TIL how to faux curse on HN. To type display "f***ing", I need to type out "f\*\*\*ing".
The day Siri will work equal to/better than other competing systems, it will be used as a main reason for which you should buy an Apple device. The day before that, it will still be something that users actually don't want.
EDIT: and to be a bit more clear that I'm serious with this, it actually makes sense. If a feature doesn't work well, you find ways around it. And if you are used to an ecosystem, maybe you don't even know how well another ecosystem works. And finally, if that ecosystem works for you well enough - or that device - you probably really don't care about that missing feature.
Apple (and Amazon) get many things right, and actually seem to pay a tiny bit of attention to user needs. So it's really not worth playing with the google stuff because you end up in these weird nonsensical hells - everything is amazing, and then they just drop the ball in a key corner.
For example, my google work calendar is EASY to integrate with Alexa along with my personal calendar. Fantastic, what's my schedule today works great. Google - falls flat on its' face for this, despite being a paying customer of their Gsuite. Their approach is just full of excuses here, and ignores that this desired interaction works well on their COMPETITORS devices but not theirs.
Just one (of many) examples. They have some sort of eventually consistent backend more often for stuff so you also get weird states that you can't delete things, changes take longer to "flow through" etc.
My guess is that Apple management doesn't see voice assistants as the "next big thing" to differentiate themselves from the competition. I think VR/AR is where they are focusing and Siri is on life support.
> Siri is especially bad when compared to Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, both of which are light years ahead.
Followed by a statement about the entire ecosystem, of which only a tiny amount is Siri.
> Usual Apple reliance on their fans buying their devices no matter how bad the software is.
Apple makes money selling devices to people.
Google makes money selling people to advertisers.
As a result Apple's maps and ML assistant aren't as good as Google's which harvests way more of people's data.
I'm perfectly fine with this trade off. Lots of things iPhones do are even presented at as the data never leaving your phone at keynotes/press releases, and ads. A bullet point notably missing from Android phones. I deliberately use Apple's admittedly worse maps application whenever possible because I know it's not telling Big Brother about me when I know Google maps is.
I would agree that Apple is significantly better on user privacy than Google or Facebook but that does not mean that the NSA isn’t sucking up all your data from Apple Maps.
Claiming that Apple isn’t “telling Big Brother about me” is at best naive and at worst dangerous misinformation that could put activists and whistleblowers at risk of having their location data harvested by the US war machine.
I’ve never used anything non-Apple nor have I used any non-phone voice assistant, so I’m not in a position to compare, but as long as it calls the people that I want, sets timers and alarms as needed, and routes me to my city of choice, why would I care?
>I’ve never used anything non-Apple nor have I used any non-phone voice assistant
You're coming at it without experience. If you try the google and/or amazon version, you may still find Siri acceptable but I can absolutely guarantee you will not be surprised anymore when people call Siri shitty, because companied to amazon and google, it is.
I get Siri via car play, but even car play is sandboxed because it can’t control things like the radio or temperature.
Example: I frequently switch between display profiles to suit what I need. Saying
"switch to cinema display mode" - works fine.
Saying:
"switch to user display mode" - 100% of the time results in the TV replying "which user would you like to select?".
Like...it's not my fault that the dumb TV has the custom profile named "User".
Google probably spent billions on voice recognition, but it's all worthless, because someone without an ounce of imagination just coded it to react to the words "change" and "user" as the user profile selector, the rest of the sentence be damned.
But back to cars - Google Assistant in Android Auto is equally shit. Try saying "hey google, open spotify", then "hey google, play music". 100% of the time, it switches from Spotify to Google Music. It's insane.
It's not just Amazon/Google, car manufacturers like Hyundai are selling data to Verisk, a data broker, who in-turn sells the individuals driving data to insurance companies and other entities [2]. They get people to "opt-in" by offering people free 'connected services' which has data-sharing buried in the T&C.
I'm sure other manufacturers are also going to do similar things as this allows them to generate additional, incremental revenue from user data about their end users.
[1] https://www.motor1.com/news/239477/toyota-android-auto-priva...
[2] https://www.verisk.com/press-releases/2018/april/hyundai-joi...
https://www.motor1.com/news/239477/toyota-android-auto-priva...
(joking aside, is that voice control developed in the US or in Germany?)
Seriously - my guess is that they try to perform the speech recognition client side (on the local hardware) and are less agressive on how they collect data for model training.
Unlike Google or some company in China which make thin clients that send everything to a central server where it is much easier to recognize, correct and train.
But wmf was right on the money [2]: "Maybe Apple thinks they can outdo the Cortex".
The iPhone’s magic was all about the software to me.
To say Apple is benign is ridiculous. To say they're better on privacy than google is just true.
This isn’t even really a criticism of Apple, it’s just the reality of the world that we have created since 9/11. I don’t believe any company that operates at Apple’s scale can keep its infrastructure totally private and secure from abuses of user privacy by the state. Especially if that company has infrastructure or employees in countries like the US/UK/China that are notorious for having extrajudicial/illegal/secret/unaccountable surveillance programs.
Totally agree with you on Google, they are the worst by far on user privacy. And we shouldn’t really expect anything different from a company that derives almost its entire revenue from advertising/data AND has been deeply connected to the intelligence agencies from Day 1.