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Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

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Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#61

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.

They also want a piece of Discord, so that's most private group conversations along with the voice chats.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#62
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”.

This is not much to do with the speech recognition itself, but with the AI behind interpreting the commands.

I'm indeed also a bit surprised that this hasn't progressed. It's still not possible to say things like "Turn on my living room lights and the hallway as well". It still feels very scripted where you have to say things exactly the right way and in bite-sized chunks to make it work. The same with Alexa by the way.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#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 transition across our core platforms in Healthcare and focusing on our AI-first approach in Enterprise. In Healthcare, we saw solid performance in our cloud-based offerings, growing cloud revenue 28% year-over-year. In particular, we benefited from strong performance in Dragon Medical & DAX Cloud revenue, which grew 22% year-over-year driven by the ongoing transition of our installed base to Dragon Medical One, as well as traction in international, ambulatory and community hospital markets. Enterprise delivered another record revenue quarter, up slightly from its previous record in Q1'20, driven by particularly strong demand for our Security & Biometrics solutions."

Nuance has deep relationships built with nearly every health system in the US and beyond. This fits quite well with Microsoft's corporate focus. Yes, Nuance also has a lot of IP, but I wouldn't expect any consumer facing changes (e.g. Cortana) in the near term.

[1] https://investors.nuance.com/download/EX%2099.1%20Press%20Re...

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#64

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.

Nuance is text to speech in hospitals, government, call centers etc.. This is a market access play.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siri is brain-damaged. I am constantly disappointed with how stupid she is compared to Alexa and the gap is widening. I try to keep things as simple as possible with her because she always disappoints me. I wish Apple would open up a tiny bit of those 200 billion in cash reserves on improving Siri.

>she always disappoints me siri doesnt default to female voice anymore.

Siri is a female name[1] so it makes sense to use ’she’ when humanizing her.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri_(given_name)

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#66
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'm pretty sure Nuance also does the Comcast Xfinity voice remotes. They are actually really well done. And it's a humongous customer to have your claws in.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#67
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”.

Youtube since recently (or I just noticed it) has very good auto-CC, their voice recognition even works in noisier videos.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#68
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly haven't had the pleasure of trying to use voice control in a Mercedes-Benz. It makes Siri and Cortana seem telepathic by comparison.

Have you tried speaking to it in German? (joking aside, is that voice control developed in the US or in Germany?)

German always works! (For cats at least.)

Seriously - my guess is that they try to perform the speech recognition client side (on the local hardware) and are less agressive on how they collect data for model training.

Unlike Google or some company in China which make thin clients that send everything to a central server where it is much easier to recognize, correct and train.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#69
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”.

You have draw a distinction between voice recognition and digital assistants. Nuance is really just the former.

Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B

#70

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.

You don't know their roadmap or plans for Nuance yet you attribute motive.

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