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Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

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Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#281

Post by microtherion »

tambourine_man wrote: post #273
perardi wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has had some decent ones. P.A. Semi, notably. And for $278 million dollars, the ROI on that was ludicrous. 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 It seems like these “big” mergers tend to now show the synergies people promise. Maybe it’s just too…

>Apple has had some decent ones. P.A. Semi, notably And, let's not forget, NeXT. Probably one of the best U$400 something million ever spent.

It's funny how there seems to be so little correlation between acquisition prices and eventual value. The PA Semi acquisition was an enormous success at what was at the time a tiny price. NeXT was an enormous success, though $400M at the time was a bet-the-farm price for Apple.

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.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#282

Post by pie420 »

jxramos wrote: post #182
ryanSrich wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s literally better than Siri. I don’t know how, but it is. I’d say it’s even better than Alexa in terms of its ability to recognize things I say.

I think they've been at it for a pretty long time with old products like Dragon. A friend used to work there some years back and said they pretty much perfected speech detection up to some very reasonable error rate. I imagine they've just continued to cover all the dark corner cases and irregularities and accents etc.

No, the real challenge now is how do you minimize the amount of processing power needed, or bandwidth needed, and how do you do all this while minimizing translation time to under 0.5 seconds.

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.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#283

Post by microtherion »

qntmfred wrote: post #280
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect. Nuance was a company that originated decades ago, SRI did build Siri, using Nuance's speech technology, but Nuance itself did not spin out of SRI.

https://www.sri.com/hoi/natural-language-speech-recognition/ > SRI spun off market leader Nuance Communications to commercialize the technology https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-president-of-sri-ventures-on-bri...

That's true, but technically, the company that is named "Nuance" today was originally named "ScanSoft". They bought the original Nuance and assumed its name.

It's a bit like Symantec, which bought everything, including its name.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#285

Post by jonas21 »

BoorishBears wrote: post #232
schmuelio wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't remember how android handles screen rotations so I went and checked, I looked on both my phone and my tablet on a plethora of apps: - YouTube - GMail - FireFox - Plex - RIF (Reddit app) - Material (HackerNews app) - Main home screen - Sudoku game All of them animated screen rotation just fine, with no blank screen or glitching. Just a smooth animation of the app screen rotating from portrait to landscape (an…

You realize I work on Android devices all day long right? I have 5 of them sitting in this room! You might not notice, but I assure you, they clear the screen then fade back in. The exceptions are apps that have to handle configuration changes anyways like games or full screen video. It's not always a janky thing, phones have gotten fast enough that the screen redraw is easily hidden behind a half rotate followed by…

I haven't written Android code in a few years, but IIRC, there's an attribute you can add to your manifest that lets you handle the rotation without getting your UI getting destroyed and recreated. This is relatively easy to do and seems to be commonly done, at least for bigger apps.

Having worked in both Android and iOS development, I can assure you that they both have some ridiculous quirks and confusing APIs, but you eventually just learn to deal with them.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#286

Post by ionwake »

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…

There is only one English "conversational" voice that I see ( which seems to be the best).

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

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#287

Post by ffggvv »

bombcar wrote: post #190
dalbasal wrote: post #188

I think a lot of big acquisitions make "sense," given the current market. 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. Googl…

Acquiring is a simple way to show the Board/Shareholders that you're "doing something" - but I suspect it's rarely very successful in the long run. Unless you acquire a business that ACTUALLY provides some synergies you're just on the path of transitioning from a successful company to a poor imitation of Berkshire Hathaway. It does have the advantage that you can "spin off" your acquisitions once they fail to do anyt…

google maps and youtube and instagram were acquisitions

2/3 of those arguably are among the most important parts of their respective companies

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#288

Post by jesseryoung »

16bytes wrote: post #63

For those confused, this acquisition is due in large part by Nuance's dominance in healthcare related products. From Nuance's last earnings release[1]: “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 tra…

I work in healthcare software and recently did a spike building a voice assistant for the EMR. We compared Google, AWS, Azure and Nuance's voice and intent recognition and Nuance blew all the others out of the water. When it comes to understanding medical terminology Nuance is way ahead of anything other providers have.

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).

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#289

Post by fakedang »

vagrantJin wrote: post #204
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…

Bruh. You have deep issues. No thinking thinks anything is free. Its free as in I can walk in get treated and walk out without having a cent or anyone asking about my credit details. The difference is in the quality of care as gov run hospitals have much tighter budget constraints and can't treat patients with as much delicacy as private medical institutions.

> You have deep issues

Thanks for the personal attacks. Highly appreciated /s

> The difference is in the quality of care as gov run hospitals have much tighter budget constraints and can't treat patients with as much delicacy as private medical institutions.

Yet somehow places such as Singapore, Thailand and Japan manage to provide top notch healthcare even in government institutions, healthcare that is much better than most private European hospitals.

And yes, my point was exactly about how a not insignificant number of people in Europe seem to think that their healthcare comes for free (because they don't pay tax for a variety of reasons).

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#290

Post by genericone »

mrkramer wrote: post #249
paxys wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that none of these companies are competing with Microsoft also makes it easier. That's not the strategy Google, Facebook etc. normally use.

Maybe they are not competing with them right now but they have aspirations to break into their industry and then compete with them. They figured out it was easier to acquire them than try to build it from the ground up.

Easier to acquire AND easier to divest from if there are any monopoly-related/law-related issues.
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