5 ms·

What’s the angle here? Microsoft wanting a position with interactive voice products for dataset curation? Getting into the automotive supplier space? Surely it’

by Donald 5y ago

What’s the angle here? Microsoft wanting a position with interactive voice products for dataset curation? Getting into the automotive supplier space? Surely it’s not for the speech tech. Nuance has largely failed to fully embrace deep learning approaches.

AJRF 5y ago
I'd wager services for Azure.
avrionov 5y ago
Monopoly Money - Microsoft stock price is really high. They are buying a revenue and market share. Nuance has very strong presence in medical transcription, retail and a few other areas. Microsoft can move them to Azure and their own speech to text technology.
peterlk 5y ago
> Nuance has largely failed to fully embrace deep learning approaches. This may be a feature, not a bug. Explainability is very difficult with deep learning systems, and that often makes deep learning less suitable for some compliance applications like government usage. Microsoft may also still be feeling more conservative after their twitter bot learned so well a few years ago.
- Saad_M 5y ago
  Also for healthcare. Nuance is a big player in the healthcare market. A whole segment where DL approaches are not suitable due to lack of transparency.
  - elcomet 5y ago
    You won't use speech recognition to heal patients or make diagnosis.. And if you use it to control medical devices, then transparency is not what matters. A protocol matters, like the machine repeating the commands and asking for confirmation.
    - Closi 5y ago
      No, you use it for recording patient interactions and making notes. The main difference in voice for these apps is an intentionally limited and specialised vocabulary, where you have to be pretty certain that they said aberrant rather than apparent, or anuresis rather than enuresis. A lack of humeral would mean you are lacking a particular fluid, while a lack of humerous would mean you are missing a bone. The difference between an apparent mole and an aberrant mole is pretty huge, so you want to be sure your AI isn't over-fitting. Also the wider ecosystem of this is that you have to have a full software for editing and checking the notes that is compliant to local healthcare regulations, and standard interfaces into medical software. Also penetration into the healthcare market is notoriously hard. I would imagine synergies in this space include things like Microsoft Teams being in a good place to take on remote consultations compared to Zoom et al, as you could have a seamless flow from consultation to record in the healthcare system and medically-accurate transcription.
      - fny 5y ago
        I'm going to write this all with the speech to text on my droid and add line breaks after. Aberrant mole apparent mole. Works like a charm. Now let me blow your mind with another speech to text: ganglioneuralgia. I think this acquisition has anything to do with DL vs traditional. We're running opaque DL models transparency at a major academic hospital to help treat patients. This is a cake walk by comparison. Specialized vocabulary? Just pay a few people to read some medical textbooks and your done. I think they just want the reputation customers and product suite. Also they're making integrations out the wazoo with ehrs. I actually can't believe it, but epoc let Microsoft integrate teams. Integrating and licensing voice is easily a next step.
        ethbr0 5y ago
        Microsoft is having success with aggressively pushing Teams because most enterprise IT is too small-minded to explore anything else. So it's the most "modern" solution they can offer their company without having to do any real additional security work.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  The pre-deep-learning speech recognition methods don't have any reasonable explainability anyway, it's also based on large statistical models, so I wouldn't consider explainability as a reason.
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
The main reason I am worried about this is Microsoft killing off yet another viable on-premise speech technology in favor of forcing people to pay for Azure subscriptions.
- andyxor 5y ago
  if they kill off this patent troll it's a net benefit for humanity.
  - Multicomp 5y ago
    as long as MS continues to sell an offline on device version of Dragon (Naturally Speaking) in the future, I can agree. But otherwise I'm stuck on Pro Individual 15
- indigochill 5y ago
  When people want to pursue antitrust legislation, these sorts of purchases are what we should be going after. If we continue letting incumbents buy all the tech (coughFacebook's purchase of Instagramcough) with their country-sized budgets, no wonder the incumbents are unkillable.
otoburb 5y ago
>>What’s the angle here? Probably the patent portfolio that Nuance aggressively asserts[1]. They also went on a 51-company (!!!) acquisition spree up to 2018[2] after ScanSoft acquired Nuance[3] (but kept the name) in 2005, when both of them were #1 and #2 in the speech recognition space. While Nuance may have failed to embrace DL approaches, Apple has been willing to license Nuance technology to power Siri for many years[4]. EDIT: They recently acquired another company in February 2021.[5] [1] https://www.ft.com/content/dd908d81-4859-4d19-a1e8-e5f7b4f01ad0 https://www.ft.com/content/dd908d81-4859-4d19-a1e8-e5f7b4f01... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuance_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuance_Communications [3] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2556291/scansoft-to-buy-nuance-for--220m.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2556291/scansoft-to-bu... [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2014/03/24/behind-apples-siri-lies-nuances-speech-recognition/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2014/03/24/behind-appl... [5] https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/practices/nuance-acquires-saykara-to-expand-healthcare-ai-products https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/practices/nuance-acquires-s...
- b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
  This could pair very well with the Discord buy.
- scruffyherder 5y ago
  I was at one of the companies Nuance absorbed. They laid us all off, nice touch but turns out they needed me. I got all my demands met with zero resistance which only means I was thinking too low. I got to see inside the beast and it www just out of control growth from acquisition. The IBM voice patent had eclipsed scansoft was. Kind of strange MS wanting it for anything but their patents. The business was shit. As a side benefit they can shut down Siri since the apple deal was such a linchpin.
wrnr 5y ago
The automotive bizz was spun off into Cerence
DebtDeflation 5y ago
>What’s the angle here? As someone who works professionally in this space, I can say that most commenters thus far have completely missed it. The angle here is Conversational AI in the Enterprise Call Center market. This is a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. This announcement is almost certainly a reaction to the partnership between Genesys and Google to create Google Cloud Contact Center AI. I know a lot of people hate customer service chatbots, doesn't matter, companies are spending a fortune on them to replace agents and Microsoft/Google/Amazon want a slice of that pie.
- AndyMcConachie 5y ago
  Your reply intrigued me. I worked with Nuance about 20 years ago, around the time VoiceXML was being created. I was writing code in a language that was one of the precursors of VoiceXML, and then for a while I was writing code that generated VoiceXML for telehony user interfaces and that depended on Nuance. I even wrote a VoiceXML interface to Zork that used Nuance. The user could say stuff like, 'Go east', 'use axe', etc. It was pretty silly but you could play original Zork via the telephone :) 20 years ago people were talking about the big money in voice recognition being in enterprise call centers. And so it's interesting to me that this is still the big market force.
  - fzzzy 5y ago
    Playing Zork with voice sounds really fun. Back a few years ago when conversational ai was the hot thing to invest in I wondered if text adventures had a chance of coming back because of it. Probably too geeky still.

by Donald 5y ago

AJRF 5y ago

I'd wager services for Azure.

avrionov 5y ago

Monopoly Money - Microsoft stock price is really high. They are buying a revenue and market share. Nuance has very strong presence in medical transcription, retail and a few other areas. Microsoft can move them to Azure and their own speech to text technology.

peterlk 5y ago

> Nuance has largely failed to fully embrace deep learning approaches. This may be a feature, not a bug. Explainability is very difficult with deep learning systems, and that often makes deep learning less suitable for some compliance applications like government usage. Microsoft may also still be feeling more conservative after their twitter bot learned so well a few years ago.

Saad_M 5y ago
Also for healthcare. Nuance is a big player in the healthcare market. A whole segment where DL approaches are not suitable due to lack of transparency.
- elcomet 5y ago
  You won't use speech recognition to heal patients or make diagnosis.. And if you use it to control medical devices, then transparency is not what matters. A protocol matters, like the machine repeating the commands and asking for confirmation.
  - Closi 5y ago
    No, you use it for recording patient interactions and making notes. The main difference in voice for these apps is an intentionally limited and specialised vocabulary, where you have to be pretty certain that they said aberrant rather than apparent, or anuresis rather than enuresis. A lack of humeral would mean you are lacking a particular fluid, while a lack of humerous would mean you are missing a bone. The difference between an apparent mole and an aberrant mole is pretty huge, so you want to be sure your AI isn't over-fitting. Also the wider ecosystem of this is that you have to have a full software for editing and checking the notes that is compliant to local healthcare regulations, and standard interfaces into medical software. Also penetration into the healthcare market is notoriously hard. I would imagine synergies in this space include things like Microsoft Teams being in a good place to take on remote consultations compared to Zoom et al, as you could have a seamless flow from consultation to record in the healthcare system and medically-accurate transcription.
    - fny 5y ago
      I'm going to write this all with the speech to text on my droid and add line breaks after. Aberrant mole apparent mole. Works like a charm. Now let me blow your mind with another speech to text: ganglioneuralgia. I think this acquisition has anything to do with DL vs traditional. We're running opaque DL models transparency at a major academic hospital to help treat patients. This is a cake walk by comparison. Specialized vocabulary? Just pay a few people to read some medical textbooks and your done. I think they just want the reputation customers and product suite. Also they're making integrations out the wazoo with ehrs. I actually can't believe it, but epoc let Microsoft integrate teams. Integrating and licensing voice is easily a next step.
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        Microsoft is having success with aggressively pushing Teams because most enterprise IT is too small-minded to explore anything else. So it's the most "modern" solution they can offer their company without having to do any real additional security work.
PeterisP 5y ago
The pre-deep-learning speech recognition methods don't have any reasonable explainability anyway, it's also based on large statistical models, so I wouldn't consider explainability as a reason.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

The main reason I am worried about this is Microsoft killing off yet another viable on-premise speech technology in favor of forcing people to pay for Azure subscriptions.

andyxor 5y ago
if they kill off this patent troll it's a net benefit for humanity.
- Multicomp 5y ago
  as long as MS continues to sell an offline on device version of Dragon (Naturally Speaking) in the future, I can agree. But otherwise I'm stuck on Pro Individual 15
indigochill 5y ago
When people want to pursue antitrust legislation, these sorts of purchases are what we should be going after. If we continue letting incumbents buy all the tech (coughFacebook's purchase of Instagramcough) with their country-sized budgets, no wonder the incumbents are unkillable.

otoburb 5y ago

>>What’s the angle here? Probably the patent portfolio that Nuance aggressively asserts[1]. They also went on a 51-company (!!!) acquisition spree up to 2018[2] after ScanSoft acquired Nuance[3] (but kept the name) in 2005, when both of them were #1 and #2 in the speech recognition space. While Nuance may have failed to embrace DL approaches, Apple has been willing to license Nuance technology to power Siri for many years[4]. EDIT: They recently acquired another company in February 2021.[5] [1] https://www.ft.com/content/dd908d81-4859-4d19-a1e8-e5f7b4f01ad0 https://www.ft.com/content/dd908d81-4859-4d19-a1e8-e5f7b4f01... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuance_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuance_Communications [3] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2556291/scansoft-to-buy-nuance-for--220m.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2556291/scansoft-to-bu... [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2014/03/24/behind-apples-siri-lies-nuances-speech-recognition/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2014/03/24/behind-appl... [5] https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/practices/nuance-acquires-saykara-to-expand-healthcare-ai-products https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/practices/nuance-acquires-s...

b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
This could pair very well with the Discord buy.
scruffyherder 5y ago
I was at one of the companies Nuance absorbed. They laid us all off, nice touch but turns out they needed me. I got all my demands met with zero resistance which only means I was thinking too low. I got to see inside the beast and it www just out of control growth from acquisition. The IBM voice patent had eclipsed scansoft was. Kind of strange MS wanting it for anything but their patents. The business was shit. As a side benefit they can shut down Siri since the apple deal was such a linchpin.

wrnr 5y ago

The automotive bizz was spun off into Cerence

DebtDeflation 5y ago

>What’s the angle here? As someone who works professionally in this space, I can say that most commenters thus far have completely missed it. The angle here is Conversational AI in the Enterprise Call Center market. This is a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. This announcement is almost certainly a reaction to the partnership between Genesys and Google to create Google Cloud Contact Center AI. I know a lot of people hate customer service chatbots, doesn't matter, companies are spending a fortune on them to replace agents and Microsoft/Google/Amazon want a slice of that pie.

AndyMcConachie 5y ago
Your reply intrigued me. I worked with Nuance about 20 years ago, around the time VoiceXML was being created. I was writing code in a language that was one of the precursors of VoiceXML, and then for a while I was writing code that generated VoiceXML for telehony user interfaces and that depended on Nuance. I even wrote a VoiceXML interface to Zork that used Nuance. The user could say stuff like, 'Go east', 'use axe', etc. It was pretty silly but you could play original Zork via the telephone :) 20 years ago people were talking about the big money in voice recognition being in enterprise call centers. And so it's interesting to me that this is still the big market force.
- fzzzy 5y ago
  Playing Zork with voice sounds really fun. Back a few years ago when conversational ai was the hot thing to invest in I wondered if text adventures had a chance of coming back because of it. Probably too geeky still.