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Look Out, Nuance: Apple's Office Near MIT Is Stocking Up With Speech-Tech Talent
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's had a small, very secretive office in Cambridge, MA for a few months now. And we finally know what they're doing: Building a team that works on speech technology for Siri. Sure, it's interesting for Apple to have a remote engineering team. And hiring from MIT is a no-brainer. But here's why this is a bigger deal: Apple has always relied on Nuance, a Boston-area company, for the speech-recognition technology behind Siri. By branching out with its own speech team — stocked with former Nuance scientists, no less — Apple could very well be signaling a move away from relying on Nuance for this core technology. And the speech wars are just heating up: Microsoft and Amazon both have speech engineering offices in the Boston area too."
Voice wecognition on that thing is terrible. Wook.
Siwi, can you wecommend a westauwant?
I'm sorry, Bawwy. I don't understand "wecommend a westauwant."
Wisten to me. Not "westauwant," *westauwant*.
I don't know what you mean by "not westauwant, westauwant."
See? Total cwap. You suck, Siwi.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
No wonder Siri can never find the "carr park" I've been sayign it wrong all along...
Perfect Boston Accent
The juxtaposition of your post (and the topic in general) and sig have me ROFLing.
yeah, that's gonna work out well.
And the speech wars are just heating up: Microsoft and Amazon both have speech engineering offices in the Boston area too.
"Siri, wheah's a wicked good place to pahk neah the Gahden?"
It was on their last conference call that they believe it is very important. That's going to involve a lot of voice interaction.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I often wonder if Google Voice's transcription service for voicemail is a way for Google to get people to provide them with voice-rec feedback. They have those buttons to allow Google to use individual voicemail messages and transcripts to "improve" their service. You can bet they've got an angle.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
True that but I imagine Apple is well aware that they need to do this round differently then the maps fiasco. I am guessing they feel less of a threat from Nuance and don't feel the need to jump ship so quick because of direct competition.
You are all a bunch of idots.
But but but... For weeks now, Apple has been running huge ads telling me that their development work is done in California. I never figured out why I would care about that, but they assured me it was really important. Now you're telling me they are lying???? How could Apple do that to me??
Case in point. Most human readers would have no problem recognizing that you meant "going it alone", where a machine translator would be stripping its gears. And that's just for WRITTEN TEXT. Now compound the problem with each individual speaker's timbre, inflection and personal idiosyncratic verbal tics. It's HARD to wreck a nice beach.
Apple has done in-house voice recognition in the past, although that was twenty years ago.
...would be funny if any of these positions actually went to native Bostonians. But they won't; no doubt they'll be mostly MIT/Harvard/BU students and alumni from all over the world. And none of them will be older than 30 years.
The real powerhouse in speech recognition tech isn't MIT -- it's BBN, at the other end of Cambridge.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
I've tried Nuance speech recognition stuff before. Jabra uses (used?) it for voice control via their bluetooth headsets on Android phones. It was so poor I basically assumed it listened to what you said, threw it away, and made something up.
I wonder is they are going the wrong way about it. The dialog's between the user's and Siri are
truncated and one-sided.
What Siri needs to do is to collect conversations for one or two years of millions of users and learn
to carry it's own conversations before is ready to help anyone.
Perhap's Siri needs some help from the people in the NSA.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
Here's the question: are these people working on technologies to convert speech-to-text, or are they working on the next layer after that: parsing/understanding that text in a way to produce useful results. Given the state of the patent system, and the amount of IP Nuance owns, I'd be hesitant to even try to outcompete Nuance on the speech-to-text part. But there's still lots of work to do on what to do with the data that gets spit out by the speech-to-text processor. On the other hand, it's possible Apple is working on a "backup plan", but currently has no particular problem with Nuance's technology. Unlike with Google with the maps, Nuance is not a competitor to Apple at other levels, so I don't anticipate Apple is in a hurry to move away from Nuance as a supplier, the way they seem to have been with Google.
Oh give it a fscking rest.Apple Maps works just fine. The 3D viewing mode, in particular, is smoother and easier to interpret than Google Earth, more useful for an overview than StreetView, and easier to navigate than either of those two. Complaining about Maps today is like whining that the MacBook Air doesn't include an optical drive. It marks you as a deluded fool, lost in the past and determined to find something to hate about Apple, regardless of facts or reality.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-10/dragon-systems-founders-take-goldman-to-trial-over-advice.html
"In a federal trial that began yesterday in Boston, the Bakers claim that shoddy work by Goldman Sachs on the $580 million all-stock sale of Dragon to a Belgian competitor, Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV, cost them their company and their fortune. Within months of the sale's June 2000 close, Lernout & Hauspie collapsed in an accounting scandal and its shares that the Bakers took as payment for their 51 percent stake in Dragon were worthless. Worse, according to Jim Baker, they no longer had access to the speech-recognition technology they had created. The patents underlying Dragon products including their popular dictation program, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, were sold at a bankruptcy auction. "Dragon Systems and the Dragon technology was like our child," Jim Baker said in the interview in May."
That last part, losing access to working on the software, has to have been the worst part for the founders. My advisor at Princeton, George Miller, had mentored them too, and told me a little about the loss right after it happened. It is quite a cautionary tale -- losing both their life's work and all that money.
A recruiter connected to L&H tried to recruit me when I was working with the speech group at IBM Research back around 1999 on IBM's "Personal Speech Assistant" using IBM's embedded speech engine, which consisted of a Palm Pilot sitting in a larger cradling add-on that did the actual speech recognition on another CPU:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/41718/IBM_demos_voice_apps_for_Palms
Glad I passed on working at L&H given the financial disaster that was about to happen. Hard to beat the camaraderie of the IBM Speech group back then, even though it was constantly being poached by Wall Street (and others) for the stochastic algorithm knowledge. But like with many inventions at IBM Research, even with Lou Gerstner asking for a PSA to have in his office, the organization as a whole may have had trouble making the most of that lead as a "failure of the imagination" to see how such products for using handheld speech recognition could grow and blossom (in a way that Apple and now Google have commercialized).
An Apple recruiter contacted me a bit before Siri came out, and I assumed it was because I was on a PSA patent and they were doing embedded speech recognition stuff. But that was back when it was pretty obvious the CA housing market was about to collapse, so moving to CA would have meant losing vast amounts of money if buying a home (even though, no doubt, Apple would have been an interesting place to work). If i had not thought about that, working for Apple could have cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in an underwater mortgage. It's interesting to see Apple now recruiting around Boston, which, while it has high house prices, are still not as crazy as around Silicon Valley (even now).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.