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How the Inventors of Dragon Speech Recognition Technology Lost Everything
First time accepted submitter cjsm writes "James and Janet Baker were the inventors of Dragon Systems' speech recognition software, and after years of work, they created a multimillion dollar company. At the height of the tech boom, with investment offers rolling in, they turned to Goldman Sachs for financial advice. For a five million dollar fee, Goldman hooked them up with Lernout & Hauspie, the Belgium speech recognition company. After consultations with Goldman Sachs, the Bakers traded their company for $580 million in Lernout & Hauspie stock. But it turned out Lernout & Hauspie was involved in cooking their books and went bankrupt. Dragon was sold in a bankruptcy auction to Scansoft, and the Bakers lost everything. Goldman and Sachs itself had decided against investing in Lernout & Hauspie two years previous to this because they were lying about their Asian sales. The Bakers are suing for one billion dollars."
I thought Goldman Sachs were the good guys?
billions! It's so much money even the singular takes an "s"!
Mostly random stuff.
Did Goldman Sachs employees engage in some kind of fraud?
I would give my two left lugnuts to see white-collar crime like this vigorously prosecuted.
Goldman Sachs and the $580 Million Black Hole
Does it mean they'll finally stop their freaking 5 minutes long add?
Lesson 1: Just because you paid someone 5 million dollars doesn't mean they have your best interests at heart.
Lesson 2: If a deal involves putting all your eggs in one basket, you should assume that the basket is faulty, and that everyone knows it but you.
So Goldman Sachs made millions and everybody else got the shaft. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
Or at least that's the impression I've gained reading the news since forever.
More power to them. I don't know much in the area of finance and the like, but stories like this continue to give me the impression large financial institutions like to play fast and loose with other people's (read: little guy's) money. Too big to fail? More like too big to be allowed continued operation.
My blood hurts...
IN BIZARRO WORLD
Imagine that, Goldman Sachs involved in swindling people.
Will wonders never cease.
How many billions?
inevitably Goldman will weasel its way out of it.
Sell toxic crap (mortgage backed securities) to one organization whilst shorting the same toxic crap.
But it's all OK as the boss Llloyd Blankfein is just a banker doing God's work.
I read this story when it was published, the the guy that owned the company and lost his technology on top of all that money had a phd and was making huge advancements in the technology much faster than predicted, he's probably the reason Siri can exist. The saddest part is that he still had many improvements he was working on and now he just can't, the tech has been sold, he can't touch it anymore without getting sued. In the end humanity loses.
The first TFA I've decided to read in months and it's behind a paywall. That'll teach me.
I don't like GS (have had multiple experiences). But I'm still skeptical. Something seems off here. Given lack of good counsel, why did the Bakers go out on a limb, change course, and agree to an all-stock sale at the last minute? Why not walk away, or hire better advisors to get you what you need, and challenge GS fees in parallel? $580 mil was at stake. $5 mil is 1% of the pie. Seems like the only reason to sell is to get liquid. Why go to all that trouble just to swap shares of one stock for even higher risk and reward?
Who owns Scansoft, who apart from GS are the other big winners from this transaction? They got the world's best speech rec software for a fraction of its true value - I wonder who they were advised by?
Korma: Good
"After consultations with Goldman Sachs,..."
That's your problem right there.
....we have the comfort of knowing Goldman Sachs is still less evil than Electronic Arts.
NOT A SINGLE SARDINE!
And using the dictation option. But I can't create a post because every time I say g---m-- s----, all I see are a bunch of expletives in the comment box
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Considering that this is far from the first blatantly fraudulent transaction that GS has performed, why has the gov't not clamped down hard on them?
Oh wait, NM. Forgot about the campaign contributions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/business/goldman-sachs-and-a-sale-gone-horribly-awry.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hpw
Subject says it all.
No love for Goldman Sachs here but if the inventors did what this article says (trading their entire company for the stock of a mysterious L&H company) then it sounds like they got greedy.
I hope they win. Investment companies can be the scum of the earth and rarely have your actual interests in mind.
http://interserver.net/
I lean left on local standards (those of European social democracy) so I'd probably be something like "extreme left" on American standards (if we consider Democrats a left-wing party). I have no love for either Goldman Sachs or the whole sector they operate in... that said, you can hardly call what they did "stealing".
Are they unethical? Sure. Have they broken some laws by deceiving regulators? Probably. Misleading advertising? Might be. Fraud? Depends on the contracts they've used... but stealing? No. They've simply not cared about the fate of their clients - or the society - except where they had the economic incentive to do so. That kind of stuff happens when you have free markets.
For any given amount of freedom in the markets, you get some good and some bad sides. You thus choose a level where the good sides outweigh the bad ones... and acknowledge that the decision also leads to some undesired results. What doesn't work is choosing one level, at first ignoring undesired results and then, when they become too apparent, call them stealing, etc. without making an argument for choosing another level of freedom in general.
... and everyone in the industry knew that they were full of shit with their finances. The two founders - Lernout and Hauspie - were accountants, not technologists. The company had significant investment from the Belgian government, and L&H were politically well-connected enough to keep milking that funding source as they rode the tech frenzy of the 90's. In every instance where we competed against them, they always bid at ridiculously low prices that couldn't possibly be economically sensible. They had some decent technology, but their business practices were always suspect. It was very likely the taxpayer financing which kept their bubble from bursting before it did.
To be fair, Dragon was primarily involved in desktop ASR, whereas L&H (and my company - Voice Control Systems), were focusing on telephony applications. So, the Bakers may not have been fully acquainted with L&H's reputation. But, really, they should have been extremely suspicious of this deal, especially when the offer was changed to 100% stock. TFA didn't say what the value of some of the competing offers were, but I'm guessing they were substantially less than $580M. If it sounds too good to be true ....
None of this is to excuse Goldman, which apparently was hired to do something that they did not do. And clearly, the Bakers were done an injustice. But, something tells me that they were willfully blind to the possibility that this offer was unjustified. And for that, they should blame themselves.
If humans are mostly water, and beer is mostly water, then humans must be mostly beer.
10% of the deal or $10M, whichever is lower
bool RecognizeFraud(){
if ( GetCounterPartyName() == "Goldman Sachs") then
return true;
}else{
return false;
}
}
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Goldman sucks.
I RTFA and while it says that another division of Goldman Sachs was skeptical about L&H, there is no evidence that the 4 guys who handled the account had any knowledge of it or communicated with that division. Nor is there any evidence that they had any motive to sell Dragon Speech to L&H when they had a lot of other credible suitors like Ford & Sony. Was Goldman Sachs sloppy? I'd say yes. But the real fraud was committed by L&H and as much as I don't like Goldman Sachs, it's not their fault that the folks at L&H were con men.
Anybody remember MS agent and it's associated speech recognition software?
Wasnt that all designed to use the lernaut and hauspie speech engine ?
It is painfully evident to anyone who has used Dragon software that they are not technologists. I'd forgive the mish-mash awful UI if the software worked well, but it doesn't. I had a powerhouse workstation and had been "training" Dragon Naturally Speaking for a few months only to get worse voice recognition than Siri on an underpowered cell phone out of the box (no training), with crappy mic line in, on a busy street with lots of ambient noise.
Seriously, that is the worst piece of software I've ever used. Maybe it's my indistinguishable Pacific NW accent (read: no accent at all) that was throwing it off, but that program was embarrassingly bad.
It's a bit like hiring a lawyer for our defence, paying them a load of money up front, then they act as prosecutor getting you (a corporate person) the death sentence (bankruptcy)
Well, it's only in one so far that I'm aware of,
Merriam-Webster's online dictionary:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/06words.htm
English certainly is a continuously evolving language.
Although this might be more of a reintroduction than an invention: .. and of course it was reintroduced in order to discuss politics!
"From truth + -y. First attested in early 19th century; reintroduced into modern use by Stephen Colbert in 2005. [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/truthy]
you can read countless articles about Goldman trades within the past 10 years, since they became a public company especially, and find numerous examples of where Goldman 'analysts' or 'consultants' were wishy washy with the 'trading' folks , either their own or others.
just becasue finance schools teach 'chinese walls' and they talk about it in presentations doesnt mean it actually happens.
im a little confused as to what you would actually consider 'stealing'.
my favorite definition is from Jennifer Aniston's character in Office Space.
you take something thats not yours. and then it becomes yours.
doesnt mean that its factually incorrect. Goldman Sachs has a huge influence in the white house and in congress, and anyone who studies the history of the early 21st century will have to study Goldman Sachs.
"[China is going like Adam Smith on Steroids]"
if Adam Smith had believed in slavery, child labor, repression of free speech, and quasi socialist corporations part owned by the military
they are not even paper. they are bits in a computer. when the Fed wants to 'print more money' what they do is click some button to up a counter in a database. thats what money has become. there is nothing backing US currency or the Euro for that matter except for the faith of the human species.
more money, more problems.
If you have a good business that generates revenues, it is better to rely on it, rather than hope that 419 scams and "get rich quick" schemes will work for you.
The differences between GS and that Nigerian scammer are the better writing talent and the better government protection that one of them is using.
Siri doesn't do its voice recognition on the cellphone. It farms that out to machines in a datacenter somewhere.
That algorithm is good in that you won't get any false positives, but you'll still get many false negatives.
Rethinking email
From TFA:
Dragon agreed to pay Goldman a flat fee of $5 million
To my understanding a mutually agreed business deal is not stealing, even if one party does a shoddy job. If I pay you to write me a piece of software and when deadline flies past, the software isn't complete, you have not fulfilled your side of the contract and I might be able to sue you, but I don't think that the term stealing is usually used in that context.
I might be flat out wrong there, as this isn't my first language, but my understanding of the term is that you take something from me without me agreeing to give it to you. If you simply fool me into paying you much more than what your service is worth, it sounds more like false advertising, contract breaking, fraud or something.
Your code produces a massive number of false negatives (although it at least has no false positives).
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/code_pr.html
As that older article points out, the Bakers also spent some time early on at IBM Research doing speech stuff (and from when I was working at the IBM Speech group myself much later, it did not seem completely clear what way most of the knowledge was flowing). My undergrad adviser at Princeton, George A. Miller, who did a lot in the psychology of natural language and knew the Bakers (I think from when he was at Rockefeller with them), told me about this loss more than a decade ago, as a cautionary tale. More than the money, what really hurt most for the couple was not being able to work on their project anymore. For anyone who really cares about what they are working on, this is a good argument for working in the free and open source software realm rather than trying to finance proprietary software somehow, even when you think you are the "owner" of the software. Imagine if the Bakers had released Dragon as FOSS back then and built a consultancy around it -- at least they would not be alienated from their 20+ year labor of love (or "third child" as they called the software). In general, you also can't expect the same people who put their love into creating great things for the world to be fully prepared to deal with business sharks (even business sharks like GS being supposedly hired to "help" them). I'm glad my wife and I released our own labors of love (like our Garden Simulator and PlantStudio software) as FOSS instead of taking on investors and making it proprietary, since at least we can always still work with the source code. Of course, the flip side of that is often not having the time to do that because of a need to do other things for money. We ideally need a "basic income" and similar social changes to solve that problem and to minimize a software industry based around "artificial scarcity".
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.artificialscarcity.com/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I hope they get the full billion+ lawyers fees.
I also hope the GS representatives are charged with felony fraud, and their assets frozen so they have to rely on disinterested public defenders.
Yeah, I can dream.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Was trading their company for stock in another company. That was monumentally stupid.
I've spun up and sold a handful of companies now and not once did I accept stock in the purchasing company. When I exit, I EXIT, as in, that's it. The only reason I start a company is to sell it for a ton more cash than it took me to start and build it. I can then use a small percentage of that cash to start another one.
When you swap stock, you're trading something you know everything about (your stock) for something you don't know ANYTHING about (their stock). You don't know how they're cooking the books, or lying on their SEC forms, or laundering assets away, or playing other ENRON games. Certainly they could take the same tack about you, but then, you're the one with something they want, so they should be the ones to take the risk.
I have no problem holding onto a company that is making me money, if someone doesn't want to buy. If they have doubts about the way I do things, that's fine. I'll just keep making money until some other buyer comes along.
The ONLY time someone is in a hurry to sell is when they're losing money, and the company's days are numbered (like, in this example, the purchasing company who wanted to trade their crappy losing stock for some good, profitable stock). I can wait.
Just because a bunch of suits cruise in telling you you won the lottery doesn't mean you don't check THEM out too. Seriously.
Get CASH. Not stock.
Where do I get some of this FOSS goo?
This is why I don't own any credit cards, just a plain old regular free bank account.
After seeing JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs come up every time some large sum of money ends up missing, in the wrong hands or at the end of some really bad deal, even entire countries being taken advantage of (like italy). I think money is not a good enough punishment. These guys need serious jail time without bail. The problem is when you screw one person it's a tragedy. When you screw millions, it's a mere statistic.
Capitalism as practiced in north america has pretty much run it's course. Hopefully there is something to fill the void. Greed stunts most economic philosophy's.
So, in a few words, Goldman Sach orchestrated the bankruptcy of "Dragon...", in order for their favorite, NUANCE, to acquire this technology, i mean to steal it, and to become the leader in "speech recognition software", without putting any innovation in it!!!
How so....capitalist way. We BUY and STEAL, we DON'T innovate.
Funny, how you compeltely ignore the fact that the current Secretary of Treasury was a Goldman Sachs employ who is a certified TAX EVADER and that 100% of the bailout money Goldman Sachs received was approved during the Obama administration ....
I've often wondered what had happened to Dragon "Naturally Speaking", I'll soon know.
Back when, I tried both Dragon and ViaVoice. Didn't care much for either as they didn't meet my needs - voice macros.
I used IN3 (IN cube) http://www.tifaq.org/speech/windows.html I think it was Windows XP that
finally broke it, It was fantastic, small in size very little over head and it did voice macros very well.
It's interesting that the link above refers to NaturallySpeaking Professional Solutions as belonging to L&H.
(Information last checked: Feb'01).
The link (also never updated) I'm used to getting for IN3 was to a college, as it appeared to be a college project.
I guess it's finally been taken down. Excellent piece of software.
Left to die? They should have been shot. On the streets. And their possessions should have been confiscated.
The price of caring for their orphan children would have been worth it.
That's capitalism, and if you hate capitalism you MUST hate America, no if's and's buts, shades of grey, good or evil. You cant honestly dislike any part of it if you have ever bought a good or service, period, else you are a hypocrite!
Well, at least that's what FOX news tells me...
There is a common denominator that has been overlooked here... Gaston Bastiens. For those of you who go back far enough, you may remember a couple of companies known as Quarterdeck and Datastorm Technologies. Gaston Bastiens took the helm of Quarterdeck and went on a buying spree that included slurping up privately held Datastorm Technologies. Like his tenure at L&H, this period was known for cooking the books and leaving the original folks hosed. It was a glorious day when those of us who used to work at Datastorm saw Gaston being led away in chains... http://www.flickr.com/photos/markdionne/294806554/ We weren't the least bit surprised that he had done it again... we were just pleased that he got prosecuted this time.
You frequently hear the right wing "fact" that the government can't create jobs. This is false, as an example Warner Robins Air Force Base in middle Georgia is the single largest employer in the state of Georgia. You also hear about the benefits of investing in the stock market. All that Wall Street can do is make money. What do both of these have in common? Neither one of them actually create wealth. The government can create jobs but not wealth. Wall Street makes money but in the end it doesn't create wealth either. This is our new "business" model. We don't have any real industry left so all we do now is create money from reshuffling and hiding our old debt. A storm is coming. 2008 was just a warning but we didn't listen. We bailed out Wall Street and now they are back to business as usual.
Another example of the British royals screwing the sh!T out of Americans. The bakers will never win this case in Boston. hopefully some day in the future china or Russia will invade England and liberate America from British rule.
:-)
Supposed to be "good"
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It's very unfortunate that most of us geeks are not that well versed in financial thingy, and that we geeks are too trusting of others - methinks this maybe the result of we geeks, in our own geeky-universe, are generally trustworthy
Unfortunately, the world out there is filled with critters that will cheat everybody, even their own mothers !
The two inventors of Dragon Speech Recognizing System put their trusts in Goldman Sachs, which, by now, most of us geeks should know not to trust
It is even more unfortunately that the two inventors now have to rely on lawyers to sue Goldman Sachs - and lawyers are critters that are not that far removed from the kind of critters that occupies the Capital Hill / White House / Wall Street
Methinks the only way we geeks can survive the world out there is to turn ourselves into the baddest kind of critters - even more badder than the critters of Wall Street, critters in the Capital Hill and/or the White House
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Here's some corroboration for what you say:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4074
They should be suing and I hope they win. Goldman got its fee, the investment bankers at the firm made a lot of money for closing the deal and the Bakers got nothing after working for years to develop cool technology. They are brilliant at what they do, it is a shame the way the system has worked so far... Goldman's bankers were obviously highly motivated to get the deal done to collect fees. i hope they also sue the actual investment bankers who did the transaction and not just Goldman.
It seems there is some karma in effect here.
http://www.planetcrap.com/topics/8/
I just figured out what their eternity in Hell is going to look like
A lot like nonexistence. There are two hells: Sheol and Gehenna. Sheol, called Hades in the Greek Scriptures, is the grave, and it's not eternal; it ends with a resurrection paid for by the sacrifice of God's only Son. At the end of the millennial reign, "death and Hades [will be] thrown into the lake of fire [in] the second death" (Rev 20:14). Gehenna is a final destruction in the lake of fire, not an eternity of conscious torment. In both cases, "the dead [...] are conscious of nothing at all" (Eccl. 9:5).
With all due respect, I haven't consumed enough Mountain Dew tonight to absorb eschatological theology :)
You do know that Siri does not actually do voice recognition on the device itself for exactly the reasons you're giving it credit for, right?
"After consultations with Goldman Sachs, the Bakers traded their company for $580 million in Lernout & Hauspie stock."
How smart was that? I guess that move wasn't their responsibility.
dragon/ scansoft have many great software. but look like the sales is not so great. if it is marketing correctly I think it can be a booming.
SIRI is booming, meanwhile dragon have similar technology for long time. beside other software which also great.
if Google buy this, I believe it can change a lot of things.
I'm sure it's unhealthy for me to read any GS stories. I just keep thinking about how my brother lost $10k in savings because of shady investing by Morgan-Stanley. There was a lawsuit; Morgan-Stanley lost; the lawyers made a fortune and my brother got a check for $3 which he tore up. Welcome to investing in America.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Neo,
If you watch this documentary, your life will be forever changed:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/money-power-wall-street/
You have been warned.
Morpheus
At the end of the day, they signed their lives, and their company away, for a piece of paper that turned out to be worthless.
Yes, Goldman Sachs sucks. But it sounds like there was more than a little greed involved in this transaction, and that basically they got scammed because they were willing to believe their company was really worth $580 Million imaginary dollars instead of $200 million real ones.
W
This story made me sad.
That's what happens when you make a deal with the Jews.
The legal argument here will almost certainly be that, by accepting $5 million from the Bakers for consulting fees, Goldman Sachs had a fiduciary duty to act in their best interest regarding the transaction.
You can argue that they should have known better than to "put all their eggs in one basket". But the fact that the client should have known better is not a legal defense to a breach of a fiduciary duty. That's why you're paying the professional in the first place – because they're supposed to know better than you! They have a legal obligation to use that knowledge in your interests, not double-dip on the side.
The fact that Goldman considered investing in L&H and then specifically declined to do so is strong evidence that this recommendation to the Bakers was in violation of their legal duties.
They have their own line of overpriced dental jewelry,aka "grillz"? http://www.grillsbypaulwall.com/
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; A Corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person.
Back in 1997, I used to work for a large semiconductor company when I was assigned to a joint project with Dragon Systems. The goal was to develop an ARM (StrongARM) processor based hand-held device that could run Dragon's speech recognition software. It was interesting and forward looking idea. Dragon seemed to have a good team of engineers who where were very driven. But the high level of secrecy surrounding everything they did striked me as odd. For instance, on conference calls, they would frequently place us on hold for internal discussions before continuing with the call. Also, when I visited Dragon's offices (near Newton, MA), I found it interesting how they had re-purposed an old mill into high tech offices. So, I asked asked the engineer accompanying me how they managed to divide up the building and floors. He immediately shot back: "Why are you asking this?" It was naive question based solely on personal curiosity, nothing more. But it was obvious I was under suspicion. So a few years later, it was very ironic to see a company with such paranoiac culture fall for a ruse and lose everything! It goes to show that real life is full of twists and turns.
cash on the barrel, and don't put all your eggs in one basket.
> the Bakers traded their company for $580 million in Lernout & Hauspie stock
Sorry, at this point they should have carved off 10% for walking around money. Keep that in mind if this happens to you.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Ouch.... slashdot picked off an old scab for me with this story. I remember this all too well since I researched the technology and founders extensively, invested in the company before the takeover, and lost the feckin lot thanks to those damn Belgian pirates. Plus, I was a graduate student at the time so I really couldn't afford the loss. If the Bakers win this, maybe they should remember all the small investors who had faith in them back in the day.
It seems a common gambit from the Republicans to pretend its both parties. It isn't, it's mostly Republicans. Mitt Romney is not the exception to the rule here. He's just another Wallstreet tool.
This kind of thinking is exactly the cause why these big corporations get to roam free. People are thinking "They will never fail, look at their history!" and therefore failing immediately to see that OUR actions decide if they continue or not. We can let them roam free, or we can just ignore them and focus on creating a better world without Goldman Sachs. Which one would you choose ?
PS. Fighting wont help, because then we are playing game that they have basically created.
Aside from Siri, which Apple undoubtly licensed from Nuance, nobody else out there produces the right Text-to-speech/speech-to-Text systems that don't suck.
There's some good stuff out there that is fairly passible (See Vocaloid and Sinsy ... only available in Japan) for human. But when you go back to just regular speaking, most voices are either designed only for telephones (at 8khz) or IVR prompts, which still sound mechanical. In fact most of the singing voices sound BETTER to non-native speakers of that language because the flaws are masked by not having native understanding of the language. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxejtSsB6zs )
We do have the technology... locked up in patents... to make high quality speech recognition and replay it back as another voice to help interaction between blind, deaf and autistic individuals.
I remember playing with this stuff in Windows 98, nothing has changed in 15 years. Computers are still entirely driven by mouse and keyboard. iPhone's and iPad's are driven by touch screen keyboards that are unusable to blind people. Deaf people have it a little better, in that sound is not considered a requirement with most interactions except the damned telephone and video conferencing.
The paid 5 millions dollars? And their advice was to sell their company to a sinking ship (either a ship Goldman knew was sinking, or with a tiny amount of work could have figured it out)
And their defense is "We completed the transaction." That is like saying "Yeah we sold your stuff to the con artist. We knew he was a con artist, and he paid in fake cash, here you go. We did our part"
I think sueing for 1 billion isn't enough. And good luck to the Bakers, from the story it seems they deserve to win.
Not only that: there were many (ex-) politicians who were on the board at L&H or companies affiliated to them (the "Flanders Language Valley"). They were always bragging about how great a company L&H was, how it was the technology of the future, how everyone should invest in them etc. Many Belgian banks at the time convinced their clients to put all their savings in to the company, promising gigantic growth.
Off course, they all ran to the hills when shit hit the fan. Those private investors were left alone without any help from the banks or politicians. There were so many of them that they had to move the trial to a bigger venue because all people involved didn't fit inside the normal courtroom.
Should they have know? Perhaps, but the company was hyped quite a bit, and they managed to fool quite a bit of people.
Did anyone else think this was a Skyrim thread on reading the title?
It isn't the first time we hear stories about GS not investing in companies but telling their clients to do so.. I hope the Bakers get their billion dollars and GS goes bankrupt as they are ruining the whole financial market..
Cool story bro. It's cute that you think you have no accent. How endearingly solipsistic of you. You do.
Falling. Sold credit default swaps betting the loan would fail, do I get to sue.
goldman sachs is the scum of the earth.
Any Idiot can make a deal.
GS was hired to make a good deal.
Or at least make sure their clients knew what they were getting into.
They did neither.
Does it matter to the end user? Not one bit. Maybe Dragon should have used backend servers so it wouldn't suck as badly.
I'm not giving Siri any credit. I'm simply stating that expensive voice dictation software should work after a few hours of training, if not immediately, like Siri.
That's the problem hanging out here...you guys are so disconnected from the reality of the average user, you can't see simple logic like "Dragon sucks compared to Siri because Siri taps into the power of a backend database...maybe Dragon should have done that too as to not suck so badly?"
And for the record, Siri kind of sucks (as does the voice recognition on Android phones. This technology is about as frustrating as waiting for my flying car.
If someone gives you $580M in paper, sell the damn paper.
It's paper. It is WORTHLESS until you sell it.
Banks taking hard working middle-class people's life savings is laissez faire capitalism at work helping Freedom in the holy names of Saints Reagan and Rand. It's the way good government works!
"Theft" is when a fourteen-year-old copies a crappy pop song on their iGadget. It's indistinguishable from terrorism and has to be dealt with harshly.
Man, you people just aren't paying attention or something. Do you think you're living in the stoned age?
They took the common sense model of creating a business and threw it down the tubes for greed. Reap what you sew.
Zioni$t bankers, yet another violation of our rights. The gov’t constantly violates our rights.
They violate the 1st Amendment by caging protesters and banning books like “America Deceived II”.
They violate the 4th and 5th Amendment by allowing TSA to grope you.
They violate the entire Constitution by starting undeclared wars.
Impeach Obama, support Ron Paul.
Last link of “America Deceived II” before it is completely banned:
http://www.amazon.com/America-Deceived-II-Possession-interrogation/dp/1450257437
It is painfully evident to anyone who has used Dragon software that they are not technologists.
I was referring to Lernout and Hauspie - the founders of that company - as not being technologists.
Dragon technology is the state-of-the-art in large vocabulary speaker-independent ASR. Jim Baker's basic mathematical framework is still the basis for all commercial ASR systems. This included the L&H ASR technology at the time of the deal. Each company's ASR engine has its own bells and whistles to distinguish it, but the main differentiator these days is the access to domain-specific data for training the statistical models - in combination with the many heuristic tricks used in building those models.
It is hard to know the source of your bad anecdotal experience with Dragon Naturally Speaking. The technology has its limitations, and just "doesn't work" in probably 20% of the situations (broadly defined) in which it is deployed. The field needs another 2 or 3 fundamental research breakthroughs before any random use case could be guaranteed to be effective. But, many people have found Dragon dictate quite useful, particularly in restricted language domains, such as legal, medical, and business emails.
Oh, and the ASR engine behind Siri _is_ a version of Dragon, so your post is somewhat non-sensical.
If humans are mostly water, and beer is mostly water, then humans must be mostly beer.
At least for once we can say that Goldman Sachs is guilty of negligence instead of thievery.
Go Jim and Janet, Go!
Don't forget legal fees and damages!
Former Dragon Employee, wishing you well.
.. and keep doing it. Not exactly the same way, but the base theory is the same.
Actually, I hope they don't.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Everything? I take it they are homeless now? If not, there's no reason to shed tears for them. They'll just have to get a job like most of us. And if they didn't put any money aside, that's too freaking bad for them.
What an asshole...
If you think today's Bug is the same car as the 1970 car, you need to spend a little more time driving a 1968 Bug. These cars are the same in name only, you 25% estimate is way off.
Having everything in one basket that you have complete control over (the company you are selling) is risky enough. Having everything in one basket that you don't have complete control over is madness.
I bet Goldman didn't take their $5,000,000 in stock, that should be a big clue that you shouldn't take that form of payment either.
If I was Scansoft; I would drop them a few million as a thank you for creating Dragon and as acknowledgment of their predicament.
I know Scansoft has not liability or responsibility here...but it would be the stand up thing to do...so long as the Bakers were rightly appreciative of the gesture and not out to create larger problems.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Only if said island is routinely scoured clean by hurricanes and/or meat-eating crustaceans.
Yeah, right.
And the lesson is - only suckers give their money to Goddamn Sacks.
Why is it down at 0?
Dragon paid a flat fee of $5M, so Goldman had no reason to pick L&H.
I hope the investigators look into _why_ L&H was selected, instead of just assuming ineptitude.
My guess is that Goldman arranged a deal that made Goldman more money.
The L&H guys were skilled at financial fraud, so who doubts they'd propose a criminal deal to Goldman? And who doubts Goldman would agree?
Well my anecdote is working as a DoD voice transcriptionist for nearly 20 years. We always tried Dragon, but it was always awful. My point is actually really simple. Regardless if Siri uses Dragon technology in the background, it works relatively well right out of the box (on a phone with a crappy mic, nonetheless), and the Dragon NaturallySpeaking takes weeks (months) of training to still not be good enough to actually use for anything other than novelty. As a joke, we used to send each other first-email-of-the-day with the stipulation it had to be dictated and captured by NaturallySpeaking and you had to send it without editing. Good times.
Back to my main point though. Consumers don't care what makes something work. It could technically be the best freakin' voice recognition algorithm ever written, but if it doesn't deliver with little effort, then it's not worth the hassle for most consumers. If they try something and it doesn't work very well (even anecdotally), they are going to move on to something that seems to work better (even anecdotally). This, in my opinion, is where Dragon NaturallySpeaking fails. For a couple hundred bucks, it should just work, not just "kinda work, and even then, only after hours of training".
Sorry to rail against it, but this has to be the single most disappointing tech promise of my lifetime.
As someone who is about to start their own business the one thing articles like this tell me is to never trust bankers or venture capitalists. If you want to start a business use your own cash. Never trust others with your business. If you fail make sure that the failure is your fault and not the fault of someone else screwing around with your company.
http://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=810879 PDF link
They're scum.
Just sayin'......
The DeVos family is an interesting study also.....
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
Yeah...right.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Now is the sort of time you look back and might think GPLv3'ing your code base would have been a cool idea.
On the subject of social organisation I heard about a very interesting experiment by a biologist, Didier Desor, published in 1994 at the university of Nancy, France.
As I understand it, he began devising the following experiment while studying rats' ability to swim before the research took on a sociological dimension. Six rats learned where to pull food pellets out of a dispenser at the end of a passage. Once the rats were accustomed to finding their food in this location, the passage was filled with water such that the rats would be obliged to swim to get their food. The rats were anxious about going in the water at first but eventually some of them began to swim to the food.
The interesting part is what happened next. Different categories of rats emerge. The "swimmer", who fetches food from the dispenser and brings it back to the nest, and the "non-swimmer", who eats by taking pellets from a swimmer. The swimmers only eat once the non-swimmers have been fed, or in certain cases they become an "autonomous swimmer" who manages to keep his pellet from the other rats. The experiment was repeated many times with similar results : about half the rats become swimmers and the rest non-swimmers, and once established, the roles never changed.
More interesting still, reconstituted groups containing only former non-swimmers fought it out until some two or three became swimmers. In groups containing only former swimmers, certain members of the group became non-swimmers and began stealing food from swimmers. The only exceptions to this social hierarchy occured in a few groups were all members were swimmers.
Very complete video with shots of the rats in the experimental apparatus and explanations and discussions in French :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSExUj_D7mo
Here is a blog article in English that I managed to google up.
http://jeanmarcpierson.blogspot.fr/2011_12_01_archive.html
I'm gosgog by the way.
This a case in court or going to be? If so, depending on the Judge...if GS knew in advance the Lernout & Houspie were a bad investment, but then sold Dragon Systems anyway, then it would seem to me that that GS is where the liability lays, if they didn't know or suspect that L &H were not a good investment then..tough luck for the original Dragon folks. However, if that's still a viable commodity and The Dragon originators have never received a dime....then it should revert back to them as real owners.
Secondly....INFLATION....all these smartass folks who keep on with their various formulae, want to know what the figures are....its what ever it takes a family today to maintain the same standard of living say from 1960 to 2011 divided by divded by 52 should give you a real sense of inflation! At any rate what figure the Obama regime come up with you can guarantee its "Bullshit". As far as "made in America" or whatever....manufacturing goes where Labor is cheapest and that's anywhere in the world...we live in a Global society whether y'all like it or not.
why is it golman sacks fault this is like real estate 1% FOR gs vs 3% for RS agent.
They find a sutior it is not their job nor should it be to check them out. I would not trust a real estate agent to check the house out for me that is what
a professional inspection dude is for that I hire and pay.
I am sorry this happened but they should have
A; not had all their eggs in one basket basic rule
B: hire seperately a reputable accounting agency to investigate
WHy people always blame others for their responsiblity I will never understand. This stuff is called advice for a reason. GS did not stick a gun to their head and make them do this. They made the decision without investigating properly
GS is in this case an agent just like a real estate agent. They billed 1% actual slighly less a RS agent is 3-3.5% (their take)
GS found a suitor which was their job. It is not their job to vet the suitor any more than it is the job of the RS agent to vet the house you buy that is your job alone
I would never trust a RS agent to tell me if the house is a good deal they are in it for the sale no matter how good a person you are that is still the case to some degree.
It is sad but the job of vetting the buyer was the Bakers and it was also their job to get the best deal availible all stock (never a good Idea, even if it was Apple stock anything can happen)
Would you think miss used if you bought a house that had issues and you later found out someelse in that RS agency did not by the house. So it must have been the RS agencies fault. No and if you do then you are to dumb to get through to.
Sad but true this is the case. Hey I have made many dumb decisions with my failed company but I am willing to take ownership they are my fault that is why I now have to work for someone else.
Taking ownership of you failing enpowers you people and allows you to grow and avoid the problems in the future. Blaming others only allows you to comfort yourself and you will no grow and are doomed to make the same stupid decisions in the future.