Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#251

Post by ocdtrekkie » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

raobit wrote: post #248

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear in mind, Nuance is often the voice technology behind other companies' speech-based products too. Nuance technology originally powered Siri, for example.

Is Nuance into healthcare or speech/voice recognition? Didn't knew about the Siri thing though

Nuance is a speech recognition company, but due to their on-premise software which has a lot of integration options and having custom distributions for medical and legal jargon, they tend to be a go-to choice for adding voice to professional highly-regulated industry platforms.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#252

Post by chipotle_coyote » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

fakedang wrote: post #174

andybak wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> before fleeing communism to move to China Is there some level of humour here that I'm missing? (and yes I know all the subtleties around the Chinese system. But still - that's a heck of a sentence to throw out uncritically)

He makes a lot of valid points about the unsustainability of the European system, but yeah couldn't help a chuckle at that line.

The "valid points" about how socialism will surely drive all of Europe bankrupt within the next decade have been repeated for the last seventy years. I'm sure they're right this time, though.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#253

Post by Nimitz14 » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

eghad wrote: post #234

Nimitz14 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That answer depends on the language and on your use case. It seems like you're asking about desktop apps, but my parent was not talking in that context. Indeed there's not a lot of choice there because there's no money in it.

I'm even talking vs custom trained models with Kaldi (was working on a startup that was trying to create lessons for public speaking so we could grab enough data to tackle accent remediation/help those with aphasic speech disorders) and again just reiterating, the out of the box performance of Nuance's products are just better than anything else. Obviously Nuance is more than just speech recognition, but still not su…

If you have the data and a specific domain you can focus on then building a custom model [with kaldi] should always win. That's what I've done in the past (beating google, nuance etc.). You most likely didn't have the data and/or didn't know kaldi well.

> 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.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#254

Post by jschwartzi » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

ratsforhorses wrote: post #203

fakedang wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you get the impression that I'm criticizing the NHS or a nationalized Healthcare service. I'm all for a nationalized healthcare service. My issue is with people who pay nil significant taxes in Europe gloating ignorantly about how European Healthcare is free, and won't stop shitting on American Healthcare. Yeah, your healthcare is cheaper than the US but it isn't free. There is a whole bunch of mid…

Just a thought, "paying nil significant taxes" would mean lower or nil income...? we could also include refugees, prisoners in that group I guess.... these people, may also be providing a huge extra to society in the form of being low paid, having future potential or not adding to externalisation costs such as increased infrastructure needs higher income earners do... also I think the main criticisms of the US health…

> insurance is in most cases part of the job contract and that there are huge (cost) inefficiencies due to insurers battling over coverage costs with health providers.

To say nothing of how maddening it is to have to change doctors every time we change jobs, or to lose coverage for certain conditions when we change jobs, or to have to perfectly time certain life events such as childbirth or pregnancy to either before or after we change jobs, or to make sure we don't get sick during the probationary period while we're changing jobs, and so on.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#255

Post by raobit » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

udev wrote: post #46

someperson wrote: post #11

Several years ago I used a Nuance product named Dragon NaturallySpeaking that had speech-to-text capability and adds verbal accessibility features on Windows platforms (eg, say "Open Word", speak your document aloud, then "Close Word") 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) comp…

Also wasn't Siri based on Nuance technology? If so imagine them sales...

Can you link some source of it, can't find it

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#256

Post by raobit » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #15

someperson wrote: post #11

Several years ago I used a Nuance product named Dragon NaturallySpeaking that had speech-to-text capability and adds verbal accessibility features on Windows platforms (eg, say "Open Word", speak your document aloud, then "Close Word") 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) comp…

Bear in mind, Nuance is often the voice technology behind other companies' speech-based products too. Nuance technology originally powered Siri, for example.

Can you link some source of nuance powering siri, i think SRI was where it was built

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#257

Post by raobit » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #208

somethingAlex wrote: post #167

I'm not super deep into the world to NLP, but from what I have kept up with, it seems that the state-of-the-art is almost constantly open-sourced. I understand certain companies have personal relationships already built which may be what MS is after more so than the IP, but isn't there a "canonical" way of building a, for example, speech to text system for your phone? Is there really a lot of NLP IP hidden behind cor…

I recently went through a ton of speech to text engines to test them. There are a lot of open source research projects as well as paid products, including amazon and google's paid products, which I assumed would be paying for the best of the best. Dragon (nuance's products) blew them out of the water in my experience. I was very surprised. Sentence error rate is still pretty shit across the board, so tiny improvement…

is Dragon really used in large scale enterprise, unlike siri,alexa for home automation, but i am hearing dragon let alone nuance famous for its AI product for the first time

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#258

Post by 3v1n0 » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

aloisdg wrote: post #51

3v1n0 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, not that different from Google either.

Or Amazon

Well amazon can't be neither compared in this, is by far way more evil. At least Google and MS keep some key products open source, so most of them can be checked and re-packaged if there are privacy concerns.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#259

Post by ignoramous » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

alberth wrote: post #192

ignoramous wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone is wanting to take on Twilio. Well then we can expect Microsoft to swoop in for Twilio any year now.

Given that TWLO market cap is $62B at the moment I wrote this comment, and Microsoft would have to pay a premium over that current valuation, I doubt they have the stomach to purchase someone for $70+ billion. 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 assu…

I'd presume $2T in MarketCap could buy you multiple Twilios even at $100B.

MSFT isn't shy from making large purchases unlike Amazon and Apple: They take such massive bets comparatively frequently.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#260

Post by thebruce87m » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

ejb999 wrote: post #97

samstave wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now you know why there will never ever ever be “free healthcare for all” in the US because this is how profitable sickness is. Plandemic.

>>“free healthcare for all” There never has been and will never be 'free healthcare for all' - its not free, it's only free for some people if some other people pay for it.

I’ve never seen anyone argue that. Well, until now anyway.