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Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

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Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#381

Post by sbr464 »

mikro2nd wrote: post #39
varispeed wrote: post #26

So Microsoft can see your private repositories, your documents if you use Office, your personal files (one drive), your company communication (teams), now they will be able to listen what you talk about. Where is this going? Should we trust this company so much? I think companies like this should be split up.

Years ago, deep in the fine-print of the Skype ToU, was buried a clause in which anything you discussed via Skype granted to MS a worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, etc. license to anything mentioned. Is that still there? (Haven't used Skype in many a long year, myself.) I always wondered why that clause didn't render Skype unusable for any business or prospective business conversation.

It’s there for OneDrive still.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#383

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

dopidopHN wrote: post #326
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.

You pay with your taxes. Is that this hard to understand? In France when my boss give me 1 euros, he has to give 0.33 cents to a found that goes toward my healthcare. Then most things are « free ». From regular doc appointments to oncologists. Here I pay 500$/month, and then some co-pay and then some more. It’s not that different.

France doesn't have $20 aspirin pills.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#384

Post by spoonjim »

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…

Forum crowds will look to the tech but this is bang on, CEOs are ultimately coin operated and any company would salivate to get their hands on a vendor that is so deeply burrowed into the operations of the healthcare industry.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#385

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

neartheplain wrote: post #369
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speech recognition goes way beyond digital assistants. Plain old transcription is super useful, especially in terms of accessibility. I was voice coding for a while because of RSI and even as immature as the tech is, it saved my ass.

What systems did you use for voice coding? I may need to use them soon for similar reasons.

I tried a few. Caster and talon were the best. I’d recommend talon with dragon as it’s speech engine, but apparently talon has a new built in speech engine which people like, so maybe try that engine first to save money.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#386

Post by raobit »

yelloo wrote: post #132

a little over a decade ago i contracted for nuance working on a speech-to-text project for cell phone voicemail, either att or verizon. the job was literally listening to actual customers' voicemails and transcribing them (or correcting auto-transcriptions) into the system. literally 6 to 8 hour shifts of pure mind numbing work. we were told nothing about the tech behind it but I wonder if any of that work compounded…

Kind of data cleaning , any idea what the tech was?

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#387

Post by raobit »

bitwize wrote: post #12
struct wrote: post #4

What does Microsoft get out of this? They already have TTS and deep learning transcription, what technical capabilities does Nuance have that they don't have already (or can't develop for substantially less than $20B?)

Probably a crapton of patents for voice recognition. 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 it slowly going to turn towards like the OS in movie 'Her', how much of it is really possible?

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#388

Post by raobit »

eghad wrote: post #158
Nimitz14 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is accurate (and I work in this field).

And what do you suggest is better? I've worked with nearly every tool (open source and closed) under the sun in medical, industrial, and personal settings and Dragon NaturallySpeaking/Professional was by far the best in terms of accuracy regardless of prosody, accent, background noise, technical terms used, etc. Personally I think they should've been acquired a decade ago.

Where do you think dragon is used to its maximum efficiency as compared to siri,alexa in places of home automation and other menial tasks

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#389

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

millsmob wrote: post #347
NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Edward Snowden revealed that Apple has been part of the PRISM electronic surveillance program since 2012. 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…

A fair point. But it's also worth noting that Snowden recommends Signal, and doesn't say "don't use it on an iPhone" as a caveat.

To say Apple is benign is ridiculous. To say they're better on privacy than google is just true.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#390

Post by Foe »

mhermher wrote: post #360
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.

ZeniMax competes against XBox Studios or whatever their internal video game studio is called.

Since when was Skyrim a competitor to Microsoft Flight Simulator or Age of Empires?
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