What does this mean?
MS gobbling up cloud services to bolster industry vertical enterprise offerings.
Or, Microsoft is the octopus that keeps punching the fish with its tentacles.
If you’re not into their high-end stuff, Nuance helped with the AI behind Apple’s Siri.
I read that as “testicles” at first, and it was a much more interesting and hilarious thought :)
Apple has been buying a ton of AI companies the past few years. Surprised they didn’t get Nuance. Guess their focus was too healthcare/enterprise.
But no one seems to bat an eye when Apple does it
I’m not sure a number count is all that meaningful, at least when we’re talking about high single/low double digits. It doesn’t give any idea of their relative importance, especially when every tech startup is labelling itself an AI company these days. How much did they spend on them? How many employees are we talking? How many customers did the startups have?
This appears to be one of the least nuanced acquisitions ever.
Hmm Microsoft is gonna move into EHR then. Nuance’s main product was Dragon Naturally Speaking - voice dictation of medical records. It was pretty good, I knew a doctor who loved using it as far back as 1998.
I also used Dragon Naturally Speaking in the late 90s at a mortgage company I worked at in the UK.
Our owner shitcanned using it when he sent out a broadcast email where Dragon replaced the word “masters” with “bastard” and he didn’t notice.
Did he replace it, or did he just swear off voice-to-text?
He dropped voice-to-text all together.
I don’t know how long that stance lasted, as I left the company in 2001, but he was the kind of person that would just never go back to it.
LOL, that sounds like the most mild swap possible, and yet still be funny.
Nobody cares about their enduser products like Naturally Speaking. MS bought Nuance for their natural language understanding and speech to text technologies. Also to acquire their engineers and patent library.
For that annoying microphone that pops up when you boot windows 10 on that nobody uses?
I kinda doubt that. I worked in some healthcare related stuff for MS a while back and there was a lot of interesting stuff but they never really committed to it. Doesn’t seem like the kind of industry you make tentative steps into, you go big or don’t go. But that was a while back, maybe they’ve changed their tune.
You’re probably right, Epic probably has that sewn up, the moment has passed.
But isn’t that what MS always does? Stick their toe into the water after somebody else has captured the market, fiddle around a few years and then cancel the product?
It’s probably for the AI. It’s the next big thing, and MS would love to mate advanced AI with their cloud.