341–350 of 418 posts
This is really, really unfortunate. One of the last on-device speech companies is being bought out and moved into Microsoft's cloud division. Expect nobody to be willing to sell you speech recognition without a cloud subscription now.
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”.
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".
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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.
The TV remote only has to understand TV-related things, like inputs, channels, volume, and program names. Siri and Alexa have to understand everything .
"Xfinity Home, dim the bathroom lights to 40%"
"Youtube Yuri Gagarin"
Are both things it knows how to execute.
In other news, how did Pinterest go from $11B to $53 billion in roughly the last year? COVID-19 bump or something else?
Pinterest went from ~$250m revenue / quarter to tripling that in just 2 quarters. That's huge and unexpected that revenue would climb that high.
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I was actually under the impression that this is because Apple actually cares about privacy (unlike the other two) and so is not hoovering up everything you say to it and sending it to the cloud, but rather trying to do as much inference as possible on your device.
ding ding ding 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 A…
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.
Now Nuance. It seems Microsoft is still actively continuing to buy more companies and it seems Discord is still on the menu.
It's actually kinda scary to see Microsoft stretching its tentacles like this. Only this year they bought Bethesda, Nuance and there are rumours about them buying Discord and other gaming studios. Microsoft's influence is growing deeply...
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I was actually thinking " Satya, you know that Berkshire is you end game here... right? " 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…
> I agree, but I think MSFT (and friends) are in this predicament no matter what. What's the alternative? 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)…
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.
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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.
I remember people being flabbergasted by the price they paid for PA Semi. Dividing the price by the number of engineers seemed indeed ludicrous. And yet, here we are.
But wmf was right on the money [2]: "Maybe Apple thinks they can outdo the Cortex".