Samsung May Acquire Nuance, the Company That Powers Siri

[coolspot18]

This article is absolutely incorrect.

Nuance technology is a front-end to Siri not a backbone. A backbone implies a deeper connection to a given structure. That's not how Siri is designed.

Vlingo, Siri, etc. all use Nuance Recognizer technology; the NLU engine within Recognizer allows these products to perform "intelligently" with speech recognition. Recognizer will understand the user and return an "intent" back to the calling application - all the data will be nicely parsed to the calling application (i.e. Siri). Siri merely needs to submit the data to its backend services to perform the action - whether its search, calendar updates, etc.

We also don't know how much services work Nuance did for Apple - for all we know, the entire grammar set, tuning, and other significant professional services could have been implemented by Nuance.

In short, Recognizer performs almost 60 to 75% of the work (listening, parsing, and returning the intent) - the difficult part, the rest of it is relatively "simple" procedural programming.

 

[dec.]

One thing for sure:

If they do buy Nuance, Samsung is more likely to continue to license to others, than if Apple was the buyer.

Apple has a history of putting a lockdown on a company or product that had been shared for years by many companies.

E.g. Buying AuthenTec, whose fingerprint sensors had been used since the turn of the century by everyone. And buying an exclusive for LiquidMetal, which Samsung and others had used since 2002.

Do you have any examples for companies that Samsung have bought and then shared?

 

[a0me]

Lets hope that The New Siri that they bring in house works better than the Maps that they brought in house.

The app works great. It's just the maps and POI data that suck.

 

[macs4nw]

Why the hell hasn't Apple bought them by now?

Perhaps their own rumored in-house solution to voice recognition has progressed to the point where they feel that it is the better (less expensive) option? One would hope, they've learned from their Maps shortcomings.

 

[dreadnort]

Samsungs a big company

Samsung may not be trying to by this for their phones, they make alot of other kit. you might find it in their TV's or fridges.
Me "Siri, whats the best before date on the milk"
Siri "Open the door and look for yourself"

 

[vice-versa]

Nuance makes softwares for several different platforms. Not sure why people here are crying about this rumor. Samsung still makes ips panels for apple. Or what they call retina displays. Lol

From Sammobile.

"Nuance Communications known for its speech recognition solution and popular Android keyboard, Swype, is possibly in discussion to sell off the company. The Wall Street Journal report claims Nuance has been in talks with Samsung and other private-equity firms. However, one important thing to note is that their sources are not able to confirm the timeline, which means the talks could be preliminary, in advanced stages or could be shelved altogether.

Nuance’s solutions are used in Samsung handsets, tablets and even used by other industry players like Apple, Panasonic, Nintendo."

 

[thekeyring]

Seems odd, as Samsung phones run Android, and Android includes a Siri competitor.

 

[samcraig]

Seems odd, as Samsung phones run Android, and Android includes a Siri competitor.

Samsung already has a Siri "competitor" on their phones of their own.

 

[Ted13]

Why?

The first thing Samsung users do if they're smart is to disable S-Voice and use Google Now for everything. Why not just save money and not include S-Voice?

And your evidence of this is...crickets.

The reason Samsung would want to buy them is that they want all the tech needed to split from Google, either via forked Android a la Amazon and Chinese OEMs, or via their long gestating Tizen. They may never do it, but the possibility of it helps keep Google demands in check.

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Even. When. I. Say. Every. Word. Perfectly. Siri. Sucks. So. Bad. It. Hurts.


I can drink a fifth of whisky and be chomping on a burrito with 110db random background noise and Google Now gets every word.

WTF Apple, just buy voice recognition services from Google until you can get your in house stuff in order. Siri makes iOS look like a joke. A sad joke.

Apart from conflating Siri with Nuance voice recognition, you are full of it. I speak with an accent and voice dictation on the iPhone (which I use constantly for texting on the go) works spectacularly well. I speak naturally -- enunciating is useless.

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Why hasn't Apple bought Nuance?
For all of you wondering, you might want to do some research into Nuance's very checkered legal past - there are disputes vs. founders, IP ownership, etc. It is not too clear what anyone buying Nuance is buying.

Meanwhile Apple has been hiring key developers from Nuance. How far along Apple are in-house with voice recognition is anyone's guess. If anyone has a better idea than me, please post.

 

[DotCom2]

Apple could have used the billions at its disposal to nudge the unwilling partner. Not every NO needs to stay a no.. Apple could have used its position with the unwilling partners customers to drop them - Apple could have paid x more for 2 yrs if a company stopped doing business with the unwilling partner, or cut them off from Apple platforms. Once that happens and whatever sales the unwilling partner had vanishes, Apple could swoop in and buy them out for 10¢....

Or is that illegal?

If a company refuses to sell then it's just NOT gonna happen no matter how many "could have's" enter into the equation and that is a FACT!

 

[thekeyring]

Samsung already has a Siri "competitor" on their phones of their own.

My mistake. Thanks.

 

[ghost of jobs]

Stupid Samsung, don't they realize Google Already offers a service for this, called Google Now... why fragment even more with your horrible OS Skins and apps that make this worse.. I would seriously consider Android if Google was the sole developer and they put some more effort into making it better.

Google play edition of the HTC one m8. Perfect combo

 

[mtneer]

If a company refuses to sell then it's just NOT gonna happen no matter how many "could have's" enter into the equation and that is a FACT!

There are always ways to turn a no to a yes in the business world:
- blockade the owners/ executives and their relatives from your platforms
- ban any supplier from doing business with the errant entity
- provide cash incentives for other customers to drop the errant entity
- unleash your lawyers to pick apart any patent violations, if the patents are held by other companies, offer to pay for patent litigation on their behalf to tie up the errant entity in courts
- poach key people from errant entity
- lobby to threaten to increase regulation in the errant company's area of business

Everybody has a price - most declare it willingly, others need some motivation (positive or otherwise).

 

[kdarling]

Do you have any examples for companies that Samsung have bought and then shared?

Good question. I think that Samsung rarely buys other companies. Instead they mostly seem to invest, to prop them up, and make sure their product is available to Samsung and others.

For example, Samsung has invested quite a bit in Sharp (LCD panels), Corning (Gorilla Glass and LCD glass), Wacom (pen digitizers), Pantech (smartphones), among many others... all of whom continue to provide products to anyone. Obviously Samsung gets a guaranteed share of output and perhaps early access to the latest inventions, but they don't lock others out.

In the case of a competitor like Pantech, the investment helps keep them as customers of Samsung's chips. (Samsung invests $50 million to keep Pantech going, because Pantech buys $200 million worth of chips a year.)

Samsung did buy a low power WiFi chip designer not long ago, but they then incorporated the technology into chips that they sell to anyone.

--

OTOH, Apple heavily relied on others' technology to be successful with the iPhone. From the cellular infrastructure and market built by companies like Motorola, Nokia and Samsung, to memory and radio and CPU chips, to LCDs... to compelling tech like Google Search, Maps, YouTube. Even Siri started as a DARPA project paid for by our tax dollars.

Just imagine if all those sources had acted like Apple so often does, and refused to share / sell tech to Apple. There'd be no iPhone.

Samsung sells tech. Apple buys it, claims it as their own, and then usually makes sure no one else can use it.

 

[TrentS]

Ugh!!

In a few weeks...

iPhone user, "Siri, who is the best innovative technology company in the world?"

Siri, "Why Samsung, of course!"

 

[coolspot18]

Why hasn't Apple bought Nuance?
For all of you wondering, you might want to do some research into Nuance's very checkered legal past - there are disputes vs. founders, IP ownership, etc. It is not too clear what anyone buying Nuance is buying.

It doesn't have anything to do with the IP, but more so that Nuance is a large company - 1.7 billion in revenues; Nuance's main divisions are Health Care, Enterprise, Document and Imaging, and Mobile/Automative. Apple only needs 1 of the 4 divisions, but the Health Care division generates 50% of the revenues. All divisions rely on the core Nuance technology ...

So you can't really buy the company to split it, or if you do buy it, you're paying a very large premium for a very small part of the company. It just doesn't make sense for a niche company like Apple.

Samsung, IBM, HP, etc. on the other hand is logical since they have a place for each part of the company.

 

[i4m]

childish or just business?

there's an intersection between the two that makes for a really fine line

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If Siri died, all I would say is good riddance. Can't believe it's still in beta, nor that we still need internet access to set a reminder.

Siri needs some implants, you know... for confidence..

 

[Tech198]

Any company that purchases other is usually always bad.. Usualy there are exceptions,

They purchase, scrap the features entirely, or what not..

I would be interested now after purchasing how smart Siri still is.. or how well is works overall.

This can also be a good foot hold for Samsung to "get in the door" and bring this up in future court cases as a "bow down to me or else" kind of thing regarding Samsung phone and Apple issues.

Maybe this was "why" it was in beta ?

 

[Dave.UK]

There are always ways to turn a no to a yes in the business world:
- blockade the owners/ executives and their relatives from your platforms
- ban any supplier from doing business with the errant entity
- provide cash incentives for other customers to drop the errant entity
- unleash your lawyers to pick apart any patent violations, if the patents are held by other companies, offer to pay for patent litigation on their behalf to tie up the errant entity in courts
- poach key people from errant entity
- lobby to threaten to increase regulation in the errant company's area of business

Everybody has a price - most declare it willingly, others need some motivation (positive or otherwise).

The Apple way you mean.

 

[duffman9000]

Indeed. Some cheer this idea. However if Samsung were to engage in the same behavior - they would clearly be evil.

Samsung has done what could be considered much more evil and has been busted for said behavior.

 

[Trapezoid]

So Apple didn't come up with Siri. LOL, not surprised .

You thought apple came up with voice recognition? Where have you been the last decade?

 

[zipa]

And?
So what. Apple makes products to sell, they are not a charity.
If those business units (education/government/healthcare/disabled) are not profit centers, the product should be discontinues.

You can't discontinue things like that. Any government contract will have ridiculously long life spans and outrageous fees for early termination. For healthcare you'll have the same times three.

I have seen contracts in this field with agreed data retention times of 150 years, and I'm sure those aren't the longest.