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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Many speech tech startups are sued endlessly over patents [0], primarily by Nuance, and then when things look hopeless, Nuance offers to buy and make all the lawsuits go away [1]. How do you view this situation, and how will you fight the lawsuits?

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/09/nuance-sues-vlingo-again-ov... [1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/20/after-years-of-patent-litig...

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We're not familiar with the behind-the-scenes details of those cases, but we're not competing with Nuance in the transcription game. We are doing really killer audio search and view competition through that lens.

I'm pretty sure it's in their best (legal) interest to not comment at all, doing so could potentially imply that they are aware that they are infringing patents, which would be legal seppuku.

EDIT: IANAL and the above is not legal advice but I have some familiarity with patent law

Also, it's questionable whether Nuance has any grounds in many of its suits (as is the case many other patent trolls, pun not intended), but a small startup won't have the resources to fight it regardless (or construct an ice rink in front of a certain courthouse in a humid subtropical climate). Unethical legal bullying.

That seems like an insane strategy. Everyone how gets acquired there must be rooting for the company (or at least the executives and management) to fail.

Insane?

http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2008/0...

List of all acquisitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuance_Communications#Nuance_a...

In the Boston tech scene, it is pretty well-known what Nuance does and why, and is one of the primary reasons I am very against software patents, despite having several to my name.

The patents identified there seem like they're on very loose footing. Firstly they're all from halfway the previous decade ... about 50 years after voice recognition was invented (and cute detail: even their client-server voice patent doesn't quite work because the first IBM speech recognizers ran on a cluster out of necessity, therefore they had "remote voice endpoints").

Everything else is hopelessly out of date. Today voice recognition happens with DNNs or LSTMs. None of those patents would apply to such methods. They seem to have attempted to patent obvious applications of voice recognition.

http://www.google.com/patents/US6839669

Obviously identifies their old product (and I'm pretty sure I can find prior art for this one) where you could report your own voice and have it, say, open notepad when you say "open notepad". It's about making a computer respond to direct commands, and audio prompts. Seems to me like this would (should ?) never apply to a system that transcribes audio. Any modern interaction system would not be about responding to commands, except in an extremely broad sense.

A page filled with a list of prior art: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=f3IV90zLmaEC&pg=PA209&l...

https://www.google.com/patents/US6785653

Is about interactions with users based on prompts. Essentially a scripted interaction with people

Again this was filed in 2000. There has got to be prior art for this one. I remember using a system that did this before I entered high school, in 1994. And that was a pretty mature program, I bet when it comes to demos and papers you should be able to find systems doing this in the 70s.

Obvious prior art, as the computer is obviously using prompts (e.g. the purchase confirmation) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7q1cE9_AaQ1 (date: 1989)

https://www.google.com/patents/US7058573

Is about methods to adjust past recognized words on semantic meaning. Seems to be talking about this sort of thing "I was about two" => "I was about to". A neural net recognizer doesn't do this at all.

Also obviously prior art : this IBM engineer explains that this is exactly what he's doing. Judging by that computer this is early 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpdm1O-ob48

http://www.google.ch/patents/US7127393

Is about limiting voice recognition results based on a set of rules. Why would anyone work things this way in 2016 ? It is far easier to just transcribe and respond conversationally to the transcription (or just train a network to respond directly, negating the need for actually having any rules at all. You'd just show the system what to do).

Interesting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw8XbmzOG5s

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