So unfair that you are forced with your arms twisted behind your back to spend that much money on such a terrible device! What a gyp!
You may not realize, but "gyp" is a bigoted ethnic slur. Please don't use it here or anywhere.
Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
71–80 of 418 posts
Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
#72Hopefully they'll fix Nuance's terrible website and support.
Hopefully they will fix a couple of bugs in Dragon as well. I really would like them to have a release focused on bug fixes rather than greater accuracy
Are the bugs ML-related or with the app more generally? I've never used Dragon but I'm pretty interested in the TTS space.
Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
#73Now Nuance. It seems Microsoft is still actively continuing to buy more companies and it seems Discord is still on the menu.
And Ubuntu! Totally expecting that in the news at this point.
Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
#74Is 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 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.
I mean I can understand how stupid siri is. I find it so irritating that I always keep it disabled. But the point that anything Apple doing bad is for the lack of spending is hilarious.
In fact I'd say Apple is just keeping spending money instead of shutting it down. When IBM Watson AI sank like turd in market it cut funding and let most of team go. I think Apple doing same might be more sensible.
Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
#75Is 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”.
Lernaut & Haupsie went bankrupt in 99 holding the monopoly of every viable dictation platform and the aftermath of a enormous stock fraud that enabled management to hoover up everything at ludicrous valuations eg IBM Via Voice for something like $4BLN cash deal closed in unbelievable time, provided sufficient obfuscation and destruction to lay the sector to rest for two decades.
Microsoft is making a intervention with things purchase the way I see it.
What they have to do is provide a Linux version or at least O365 interop as good with Edge for Linux as Windows.
Nuance support and products are hopeless - my subscription for $120/yr stopped working with ios14 and the app refused to send password reset emails and then we discovered that no online account management existed and cancelled instead of relying on 8/5/300 telephone queuing.
Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
#76For 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…
And now you know why there will never ever ever be “free healthcare for all” in the US because this is how profitable sickness is. Plandemic.
Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
#77So 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.
I agree, not that different from Google either.
One difference I've found between MS and Google: MS is much more annoying about everything they do. (Hear me out)
I'd be surprised if there is any real difference in how either company respects your privacy (neither does). But for the most part, google seems to do its thing in the background and leave you alone. Microsoft is constantly popping things up asking you to rate this or that, flinging things you didn't ask for onto your screen, basically the spirit of clippy reborn into modern data collection practices. If I'm going to have my information exploited no matter what I do, I'd rather at least have it happen unobtrusively.
(To be fair, this is just my perception. I was in a g-suite shop for three years and now onto office 365 and I feel like it bothers me about stuff way more often the g-suite ever did)
Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
#78This 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.
C+AI makes products that can work offline though (yes it has the words Azure and cloud, no they aren't required): https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/with-azure-percept-microsoft-...
The blog claims that it is so devices can continue to work when it's offline, not that it didn't use Azure when it was online, and also that the devices are intended to by deployed via Azure IoT Hub.
Which is to say, the blog doesn't make it sound like I can use this without an Azure subscription, even if it works offline sometimes. Whereas the Microsoft Speech SDK, I could just include the DLL files and run with it.
Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
#79In other news, how did Pinterest go from $11B to $53 billion in roughly the last year? COVID-19 bump or something else?
Re: Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
#80This 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.
I'm in the on-device space, here's a recent demo of my engine for a niche use case (it also does large vocabulary dictation very well): https://twitter.com/lunixbochs/status/1378159234861264896
I'll take a look! I am still looking for the right speech recognition setup for my needs. I wrote an app that largely expects text input of the spoken command, and I'd ideally like to have hotword detection + speech recognition that can be set up to output the detected command to my own software.