a little over a decade ago i contracted for nuance working on a speech-to-text project for cell phone voicemail, either att or verizon. the job was literally listening to actual customers' voicemails and transcribing them (or correcting auto-transcriptions) into the system. literally 6 to 8 hour shifts of pure mind numbing work. we were told nothing about the tech behind it but I wonder if any of that work compounded into some of their in-use tech today, or if it was all just throw away.

pointless story aside, their enterprise valuation at the time was a little under 20% of what it is today, and the company remained mostly the same until 2 years ago. wonder what the catalyst was for their 5x valuation growth?