Prediction: Baidu could announce acquisition of Nuance Communications in the coming weeks
January 12, 2015 No Comments by Asian Sweeper 1 minute to read
Baidu has been actively involved in the speech recognition field and is looking to expand.
The company published their breakthrough deep-learning based speech system at the end of December, which is capable of outperforming existing state-of-the-art recognition pipelines in two challenging scenarios: clear conversational speech and speech in noisy environments.
The company, which is actively pushing to become a leader in the field is currently outperforming Google, Microsoft and Apple in the ‘laboratory’ environment. Further, they are looking to gain foothold in the commercial side of the business. Nuance Communications is the company behind Apple’s Siri with a lot of patents and contracts.
As Baidu notes in their scientific publication:
Tapping the benefits of end-to-end deep learning, however, poses several challenges: (i) we must find innovative ways to build large, labeled training sets and (ii) we must be able to train networks that are large enough to effectively utilize all of this data. One challenge for handling labeled data in speech systems is finding the alignment of text transcripts with input speech. Nuance would be the only option for Baidu. First, users’ speech material from Siri would solve the first problem – gathering large datasets for training their speech models. Secondly, Baidu doesn’t seem to have a solid commercial output for their research just yet. Building an organic solution would take time, but acquiring Nuance would gap them in a position where they could immediately apply their technology to the real world.
Furthermore, this move would strengthen Baidu’s mapping services position against Alibaba’s Autonavi and Tencent.
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