cross pond high tech

Microsoft acquired the AI speech technology company Nuance for $19.7B, its second-largest purchase after it bought LinkedIn for $26B in 2016. Microsoft reportedly wants to use Nuance's tech — which includes the transcription tool Dragon — in its health-care cloud products.

More:

• The all-cash deal is expected to boost Microsoft's voice recognition and medical computing capabilities and offerings.
• Dragon uses deep learning to transcribe a person's speech and improve its accuracy by adapting to their voice. It can transcribe doctor's visits, customer service calls, and voicemails.
• Nuance has been licensing the technology to companies for years. The tech formed part of the basis for Apple's Siri, which could pose as a conflict of interest between the companies if it is still involved in Siri's operation.
• In 2019, Microsoft and Nuance announced a partnership to incorporate AI assistants into doctors' visits. They later integrated Nuance's tech into Microsoft’s Teams.
• The tech giant plans to implement Nuance into its cloud-based health-tech products launched in 2020, such as patient monitoring systems, electronic healthcare records, and care coordination.
• The acquisition could also allow Microsoft to integrate advanced voice recognition into services including Teams and Bing and generate transcripts, according to Bloomberg analysts.
• Microsoft will purchase Nuance for $56 per share, a 23% premium over its closing price Friday.

Amazon’s voice-controlled personal assistant is creating chaos for people called Alexis, Alex and Alexa; TV sitcom tried to order milk — Life has been complicated ever since Alexa Sussman and her parents started using Amazon's Echo and its built-in ‘Alexa’ assistant.“Alexa, stop!” Joanne Sussman screamed in her living room.Immediately, the computer living inside her Amazon Echo speaker stopped playing her favorite music station. Simultaneously, Mrs. Sussman’s 24-year-old daughter, Alexa, froze on the stairs.

How Fireflies.ai works? ​Users can connect their Google or Outlook calendars with Fireflies and have our AI system capture meetings in real-time across more than a dozen different web-conferencing platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, GoToMeeting, Webex, and many ​more ​systems. These meetings are then indexed, transcribed, and made searchable inside the Fireflies dashboard. You can comment, annotate key moments, and automatically extract relevant information around numerous topics like the next steps, questions, and red flags.

Instead of spending time frantically taking notes in meetings, Fireflies users take comfort knowing that shortly after a meeting they are provided with a transcript of the conversation and an easy way to collaborate on the project going forward.

Fireflies can also sync all this vital information back into the places where you already work thanks to robust integrations with Slack, Salesforce, Hubspot, and other platforms.

Fireflies.ai is the bridge that helps data flow seamlessly from your communication systems to your system of records.

This approach is possible today because of major technological changes over the last 5 years in the field of machine learning. Fireflies leverage recent enhancements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), natural language processing (NLP), and neural nets to create a seamless way for users to record, annotate, search, and share important moments from their meetings.

Who is Fireflies for? ​The beauty of Fireflies is that it’s been adopted by people in different roles across organizations big and small:

• Sales managers​ use Fireflies to review their reps’ calls at lightning speed and provide on the spot coaching
• Marketers ​create key customer soundbites from calls to use in their campaigns.
• Recruiters ​no longer worry about taking hasty notes and instead spend more time paying attention to candidates during interviews.
• Engineers ​refer back to specific parts of calls using our smart search capabilities to make everyone aware of the decisions that were finalized.
• Product managers and executives​ rely on Fireflies to document knowledge and important initiatives that are discussed during all-hands and product planning meetings on how to get access ​Fireflies have a free tier for individuals and teams to easily get started. For more advanced capabilities like augmented call search, more storage, and admin controls, we offer different tiers for growing teams and enterprises. You can learn more about our pricing and tiers by going to fireflies.ai/pricing.