Those resources are “not just smart people, but it’s access to huge amounts of data and huge amounts of computational power,” he says.
Those companies “have huge resources,” says Michael Phillips, that they can apply to continuing to improve speech recognition and understanding, and offer it essentially for free through their smartphones and intelligent speakers, like the Alexa. Apple has a speech-focused research group in Cambridge, and Amazon has developed much of its Alexa technology here as well. With that acquisition, it’s likely that most of Nuance’s talent will stay put here in Massachusetts, but will work under the umbrella of one of the Left Coast tech giants. Getting access to that big customer base is a key goal of the Microsoft acquisition. It turns out, that’s not necessarily a business.” But helping medical facilities and call centers save money by operating more efficiently is, Croen observes. “They publish papers, and they announce the results of their speech recognition accuracy. “Microsoft has already been a very front-running technology developer - their labs and their people are world class,” Croen says. After Croen’s company was acquired, the chief executive of that “new Nuance,” Paul Ricci, continued to focus on applying the company’s technology to actual business problems - like freeing brokers from looking up stock quotes or enabling doctors to dictate their notes from a patient visit - as opposed to honing technology for technology’s sake. One of Nuance’s first customers under Croen’s leadership was the brokerage Charles Schwab, which enabled its customers to call up a phone number, say a ticker symbol or mutual fund name, and get an instant quote. But turning those lab breakthroughs into marketplace products “has never been obvious to the Microsofts or the IBMs,” says Croen.
For decades, Croen says, companies like Microsoft and IBM have poured millions of dollars into trying to get software to better recognize human speech. Croen formed that company in 1994 with three researchers from SRI International, a nonprofit research and development group. Ron Croen was chief executive of the Silicon Valley company, Nuance, that gave the Massachusetts Nuance its name in 2005. Nuance alleges patent infringement, and Omilia calls Nuance’s behavior anticompetitive. An ongoing lawsuit with a company based in Cyprus, Omilia Natural Language Solutions, asserts that Nuance has filed at least 17 lawsuits over the last decade, some of them after the company in question refused Nuance’s acquisition offer. It was also a lawsuit machine, defending that trove of patents in the courts.
For instance, Jeff Adams,founding manager of Amazon’s Alexa team, spent eight years at Nuance improving the Dragon NaturallySpeaking dictation product.
And its alumni were often hired by companies such as Google and Amazon to help build up their speech capabilities. The company “has more intellectual property around speech than anybody on earth,” says Stu Patterson, who was chief executive of SpeechWorks. Nuance, which today has about 825 employees in Massachusetts, was an acquisition machine. (Nuance, formerly known as ScanSoft, even got its name after acquiring a Silicon Valley company in 2005.)
Nuance not only bought some of the technology that the Bakers created at their company, Newton-based Dragon Systems, but it acquired other local companies that included SpeechWorks, eScription, VoiceSignal Technologies, and Vlingo. Some of that software eventually wound up being acquired by Nuance, and serving asbuilding blocks of what Nuance sold to Apple to help it launch its Siri voice-driven personal assistant.