I'm curious about the background of the team. They don't seem to have any linguistics experts from what I could tell.
That's a really, really, really stupid quote that pushes the increasingly popular world view that experts only drag the world down on every subject.
Linguists' contribution is unrelated to performance, positive or negative. Performance is the job of computer scientists designing architecture and of skilled programmers doing smart implementations of architecture.
The performance would probably go up if the company fired all presidents/vice presidents/CFOs etc., too (giving implementors free reign, unconstrained by costs and schedules), but the company would probably go under.
Every specialist has their own role to play. Thinking that subject domain expertise is a negative is indefensible.
Even with the explanation, it still comes across more as blaming the linguists than the people who assigned the wrong people to the wrong tasks.
(Why are they fired rather than reassigned? Why were they ever hired if they're the wrong specialty and aren't needed elsewhere?)
I worry about this in a lot of fields where we are heavily pushing machine learning. I was also not saying that this project is somehow poor quality, I just could not find much about the team and was curious about their research backgrounds.
Thanks for mentioning the quote I heard it from few friends who used to work in Nuance. But didn't know where it came from originally.
We have a very small engineering team who deeply understands machine learning and (embedded) software. I have invented/co-invented few US patents in speech processing/recognition prior to Picovoice. But have no academic background in linguistics. Having worked with computational linguists, they are definitely a solid plus to the team when their skill set is utilized correctly. I appreciate your question and curiosity. We hopefully will provide more information about the team on our website soon. Thank you.