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Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

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Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#311

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

ionwake wrote: post #286
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’m referring to the speech to text product. What’s the Zoe thing?

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#312

Post by suddenexample »

i_have_an_idea wrote: post #179
bombcar wrote: post #7

Is it just me or have speech recognition platforms like Siri actually gone backwards in the last few years (roughly coinciding with the AI/ML craze)? 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”.

Siri is terrible, but have you tried Google Assistant? I find it very accurate at recognizing my speech and very fast. It feels like a vastly superior product and I definitely find myself using it on my Google devices.

Google Assistant is pretty good. But Google's on-device voice transcription in GBoard (unsure if it's a Pixel exclusive) is borderline magical. The delay between speaking a word and having it appear on the screen is shockingly short.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#314

Post by intricatedetail »

v7p1Qbt1im wrote: post #52
itsbits wrote: post #23

GitHub at 7.5 billion around 2019 looks like a steal.. weird other software giants didn't try for it..

100% they tried. Can‘t imagine Google and Amazon not wanting GitHub. 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.

Microsoft can see a lot of data which means they can have plenty of dirt on people involved in anti trust stuff. Beyond certain point companies can do what they want.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#315

Post by sethhochberg »

v7p1Qbt1im wrote: post #52
itsbits wrote: post #23

GitHub at 7.5 billion around 2019 looks like a steal.. weird other software giants didn't try for it..

100% they tried. Can‘t imagine Google and Amazon not wanting GitHub. 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'd guess its a bit less irony and more that by virtue of having already been through various high-profile antitrust investigations, MS is somewhat uniquely well positioned to understand how to avoid/manage similar scrutiny in the future.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#316

Post by vagrantJin »

fakedang wrote: post #289
vagrantJin wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Sure. Personal attacks are uncalled for and I retract that part of my statement.

But the rest of my points still stand.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#317

Post by inopinatus »

FireBeyond wrote: post #117
ejb999 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>“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'm curious who you think is actually out there laboring under the assumption that healthcare becomes absolutely, and literally, free?

Given the venue of these remarks, and the otherwise reductio ad absurdum of the alternatives, we can surmise this is referring to free as in speech, not free as in beer, and they mean santé libre, to distinguish it from proprietary licensed healthcare.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#318

Post by hbosch »

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 worked years ago at a major cell phone mfg company, and we were comparing vendors (circa 2013-2014) for the voice recognition/transcription software. I remember two of the leading options were SoundHound (dba then as "Hound", which has since gone to market as a voice solution[0]) and Nuance which was a company not many of us had ever heard of.

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://www.soundhound.com/hound

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#320

Post by i_have_an_idea »

suddenexample wrote: post #312
i_have_an_idea wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siri is terrible, but have you tried Google Assistant? I find it very accurate at recognizing my speech and very fast. It feels like a vastly superior product and I definitely find myself using it on my Google devices.

Google Assistant is pretty good. But Google's on-device voice transcription in GBoard (unsure if it's a Pixel exclusive) is borderline magical. The delay between speaking a word and having it appear on the screen is shockingly short.

Oh yeah, the transcription is super good. I'm so sad it is crippled on iOS by requiring some weird app switching to work. Except for that part, it is super faster there too.
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