Apple Building its Own Speech Recognition Team to Power Siri

[BillyBobBongo]

Siri should be offline. It shouldn't rely on Nuance's servers.

It certainly needs some offline features. For instance if I lose 3G reception and ask Siri to 'Shuffle Music' or any other simple task that used to used the old "Voice Control' it is unable to do so. Irritating to say the least.

 

[TheFluffyDuck]

Lets check Apples recent in-house service success rate for a second here.

MobileMe Sync =Fail!
Apple Maps = Fail!
iCloud = average
iMessage = average
iAds = Fail!
Photo book printing = SUCCESS!

Voice recognition is going to turn out great!

 

[Traverse]

You know what that means....it will suck more.

I mean, when Apple tries to go on their own they often screw up with things like this.

 

[bax2003]

Lets check Apples recent in-house service success rate for a second here.

MobileMe Sync =Fail!
Apple Maps = Fail!
iCloud = average
iMessage = average
iAds = Fail!
Photo book printing = SUCCESS!

Voice recognition is going to turn out great!

Your post = FAIL !

 

[foobarbaz]

Apple is not buying Nuance, because it's effing expensive. It's a publicly traded company, so you can't just negotiate a price, you have to acquire 50% of shares from share holders.

Right now, it has a market capitalization of 6 billion. A take over means a huuuuge increase of demand, the stock would skyrocket. It would probably cost Apple 10 billion to buy.

And all they want is speech recognition. Nuance comes with all kinds of other unwanted business they'd still have to pay for. (Samsung as a big do-everything company might have better use for it.)

Those 10 billion can poach a lot of fantastic engineers.

Lets check Apples recent in-house service success rate for a second here.

You forgot processor design, the biggest such undertaking. I was extremely sceptical about it, but they certainly aced that one. LLVM, too.

 

[mw360]

Wait...? They don't have that yet?

Wait...wait until what? Until you've had time to read the article? Yes, they have a team. It's right there in the words: they've had a team for the past few years, it's been hiring for the past few years, and its still hiring now. Only difference is, there's a newsy spin on it with the Samsung rumours.

 

[randian]

And all they want is speech recognition. Nuance comes with all kinds of other unwanted business they'd still have to pay for. (Samsung as a big do-everything company might have better use for it.)

You don't have to buy all of a business. You can just buy the speech recognition patents and engineers and let Nuance keep the rest.

 

[femike]

Both Siri and Maps require alot of people from and in other countries doing the work. Apple really needs to use their money to hire alot more people than they have. I don't know, but it seems to me that Apple has a habit of spreading their staff thin, but for Siri and Maps are two areas which they cannot afford to do this. Microsoft and Google are investing heaps for these two services.

 

[phoenixsan]

In-house.....

development gives a company more control on the technologies developed and less dependance on external solutions. It is pretty obvious too, that an in-house team can interact more freely with another teams within a company. Sounds like Apple is putting money in future for-trademark-stuff....😀


🙂

 

[Karma*Police]

All the posters on here concerned about Siri getting worse should first read the Wired article. The voice recognition will only get better with neural networking.

 

[Oletros]

You forgot processor design, the biggest such undertaking. I was extremely sceptical about it, but they certainly aced that one. LLVM, too.

Those are not services. Apple truly excels at hardware and software but it doesn't for online services

 

[newagemac]

Lets check Apples recent in-house service success rate for a second here.

MobileMe Sync =Fail!
Apple Maps = Fail!
iCloud = average
iMessage = average
iAds = Fail!
Photo book printing = SUCCESS!

Voice recognition is going to turn out great!

iCloud and iMessage average? Say what??? And Apple Maps had a rough start out the gate but it certainly isn't a fail. It works surprisingly well now. Much better than Google Maps did at this point. And reports show the percentage of people using Google Maps on the iPhone took a drastic fall as a result and it's only getting worse for Google.

 

[larry t]

Ugh...seems like a bit of a late scramble, not good. Did Samsung pull the rug out from under them and they weren't ready for it? Not the type of thing you can throw together at the last minute, I hope this isn't going to be the Maps debacle all over again.

NO!... Apple brought the company that sold dragon dictation to Nuance, and with that purchase acquired the man that created dragon dictation, Dr. James Baker. He and the company that apple brought (Novauris) have been working on speech recognition advancements for over 20 years.

 

[VulchR]

Nuance would have been a better acquisition than Beats. Voice recognition is not just about having smart people think things up. There will be patents and proprietary algorithms involved that are owned by Nuance, so simply poaching ex-Nuance employees will be useless. Additionally, Nuance probably has the largest database of spoken language that they can use to train their AI networks to recognise speech (no doubt each time you send off a verbal request to Siri, it gets downloaded to Nuance's database to improve their recognition networks).

Simply reinventing speech recognition in-house will probably work out as poorly as Apple Maps. Apple will try, they'll struggle, and then they'll buy second-rate help from other companies. If Samsung get Nuance, Apple will have really fumbled the ball. Don't believe me? Then why is Apple using Nuance now given it has been working on speech recognition (and synthesis) for years?

 

[steve62388]

Why not just buy Nuance rather than build a team that would take years to get to the same level of quality we are at now?

Because Nuance is more than just voice recognition, they also dabble in healthcare and OCR. Doing a very quick web search I couldn't find a breakdown of revenue by division but I would guess OCR is their biggest driver. I don't see how OCR would fit into Apple's business model and splitting the company up would be a headache.

TBH I can see this going the way of Apple Maps.

 

[josh995]

So Samsung is going to buy Nuance, supposedly.

Apple will just buy it its employees and engineers. Ha.

I honestly rarely have any problems with Siri. But then again I live in an area that has really good reception. I can be driving in my car with all the windows down on the highway through my cars built-in microphone and Siri will still be able to make out what I'm saying. It's really nice to be able to operate your phone without actually touching it when driving. And I drive a lot so Siri is incredibly useful to me.

 

[zipa]

Apple is not buying Nuance, because it's effing expensive. It's a publicly traded company, so you can't just negotiate a price, you have to acquire 50% of shares from share holders.

No, not really. Really simplified: You can make an offer for the entire company to the board of directors, and if they accept there will be a general meeting where a majority vote to sell is required. If the vote goes through, the company is sold no matter what some individual stock holder might think of it.

But yes, in most cases the price would be something like the running 12 month average of the stock + 25-50% premium on top of that depending on the outlook of the company. Individual shareholders can then usually select to get paid in cash or the equivalent amount of stock in the buying company.

 

[iOSaddict]

Lets check Apples recent in-house service success rate for a second here.

MobileMe Sync =Fail!
Apple Maps = Fail!
iCloud = average
iMessage = average
iAds = Fail!
Photo book printing = SUCCESS!

Voice recognition is going to turn out great!

I guess you also forget the following in-house products: iPod, iPhone, iPad, Macbook pro, Mac Pro, etc.

🙄

 

[smizzle]

Google voice recognition runs circle around siri/nuance.

That's the weird part about Samsung trying to buy Nuance. The built in voice search is already great, so why would they waste time and money to make their own inferior version.

 

[zipa]

I guess you also forget the following in-house products: iPod, iPhone, iPad, Macbook pro, Mac Pro, etc.

🙄

Services. Those are products. And quite frankly, I think that only the Macbooks really stand out as somehow "superior" to their competition.

 

[autrefois]

Siri should be offline. It shouldn't rely on Nuance's servers.

You have to consider how much space that would take up locally. It's obviously much more important for them to include more required apps many people don't want, like Podcasts. 😀

 

[ElTorro]

That's the weird part about Samsung trying to buy Nuance. The built in voice search is already great, so why would they waste time and money to make their own inferior version.

Offline use, I guess.

 

[Oletros]

Offline use, I guess.

Google voice has offline support already

 

[KALLT]

That's the weird part about Samsung trying to buy Nuance. The built in voice search is already great, so why would they waste time and money to make their own inferior version.

Unless Samsung looks for a solution that doesn’t involve or rely on Google. They have been working on their own operating system Tizen for some time now. If they ever want to break free, their own apps would have to be good.

 

[nazaar]

This is a great idea considering they were so successful with bringing their mapping software in house.

🙄