America's Road to Fame

Chapter 169 The Future of Siri

Of course, now that William Chen has come to Silicon Valley, Zoom is not the only company that needs attention.

If it is said that among all Silicon Valley companies, the one William Chen cares about the most is undoubtedly Siri. The key to intelligent voice is intelligence, so Siri has been conducting research on artificial intelligence.

At present, both Twitter and HOLA have cooperated with Siri, and built Siri intelligent assistant in the APP to help users search and help. Especially after the update of the voice version of HOLA APP, the built-in Siri robot has been able to conduct simple conversations with users. voice chat.

Of course, William Chen knows the development prospects of intelligent voice in the future, so these small achievements are far from meeting his requirements.This time William Chen came to Siri Company mainly to accomplish two things.

The first one, Siri's intelligent voice assistant, is actually a search in essence. Users ask questions to Siri through text or voice, and then Siri searches network data, and returns results to users through intelligent analysis.

For example, when a user asks what the weather will be like tomorrow, Siri will search the relevant weather website, read the location of the mobile phone, get the weather information of the user's location tomorrow, and then give feedback.

Even chatting with users is the same. In a certain context, there will be many search results for how to answer the user's words, and then combined with the context, Siri will make a choice and then answer.This is essentially the embodiment of search.

Of course, for different users, Siri is also improving the user's portrait, providing the most personalized answer to each user, including when the user asks about nearby restaurants, in the user's portrait, his daily taste preference, price Acceptance range, etc., will be used as one of the priority factors for the result selection.

This also involves the field of personalized recommendation algorithms. These technologies are places where we can cooperate with other companies of William Chen, including Twitter, HOLA, Reddit and even the "Observer" APP.

It would be a waste of money and resources to let each company conduct research and development on these aspects independently. Therefore, William Chen will first invest 2 million U.S. dollars this time to integrate the relevant departments and personnel of these companies to form an artificial intelligence Research center, this research center will be relatively independent, but it will be temporarily managed by Siri, and all research results will be provided to his companies for use.

Next, they will take advantage of the time when the subprime mortgage crisis has also had a great impact on Silicon Valley, recruit talents in the field of artificial intelligence, and start related research.

The second thing is to acquire Nuance.The company currently has a monopoly in speech recognition, and Siri's speech recognition is a collaboration with Nuance.

However, after experiencing the blow to the economy from the subprime mortgage crisis, Nuance's current market value has fallen below $15 billion.Now William Chen has two choices, one is to acquire this company, and the other is to poach people through Siri, and recruit talents from the relevant departments of Nuance that they cooperate with to form Siri's speech recognition related departments.

The difficulty of acquiring Nuance is that although the company’s current market value is not high, many of its partners are industry giants, including Samsung and Nintendo. There are rumors that Google is also interested in cooperating with this company recently.But William Chen knew that after only one or two years, Nuance's advantages in the field of speech recognition were no longer so obvious, because their relevant talents were poached by major companies to study their own speech recognition technology.

Although Nuance currently has a monopoly position on this technology, there is not much room for development. After reaching a certain level of accuracy, it is sufficient for use. If you want to improve it, the cost of funds required is compared with the effect of its application. It will grow exponentially, which is not cost-effective.

Therefore, in less than two years, various giants have developed their own speech recognition technology. Even if it is not as good as Nuance's, it is enough to use, which has led to the emergence of this company. With so many competitors, the market share is declining year by year.

So why don't those giants choose to acquire Nuance, but dig people to develop it themselves?Then there is a measure of cost-effectiveness. After the subprime mortgage crisis and the increasing application of speech recognition, Nuance’s market value has reached more than 50 billion U.S. dollars. It paid such a high price to acquire it, compared with its own research and development. , they chose the latter.

However, the market value of Nuance is not too high now. If it is acquired, it will be more cost-effective and time-saving to take precautions against poaching by other giants.

As for poaching people to develop it yourself, the cost must be less, but the key is that it takes time. William Chen doesn't want to make Siri himself by then, and then finds that other giants have also entered this field one after another.

In particular, the search giant Google must be extra vigilant.

At present, William Chen's strategy is to first discuss the acquisition with Nuance. It would be best if the company can be acquired as a whole. Goldman Sachs contacted the shareholders of the other party, bought what they could buy, and became a shareholder of Nuance first.

The next step is to dig people, get their own useful technology, and then combine it with Siri's technology. The purpose is to keep Siri ahead in the field of intelligent voice.

In addition to Siri, HOLA is also very concerned about William Chen.

At present, HOLA has launched the function of voice intercom and voice call, and currently plans to launch the function of video call in the next version.

In addition, Chen William is also planning to ask David Jones to add the function of circle of friends to HOLA APP.

In the previous life, WhatsApp, which was similar to HOLA, only had a chat function and not so many other functions, which also limited the development of WhatsApp.

The reason is that WhatsApp had been acquired by Facebook at that time, and Facebook had other projects under its umbrella, so it was unwilling to let its various apps compete with each other, and each app would limit its functions.

Just like WhatsApp, if the function of circle of friends is added like Huaguo’s WeChat, then there will be a conflict with Facebook’s own positioning, which is equivalent to a subsidiary competing with the parent company. Zha would like to see.

The same is true for other functions, which is one of the reasons why WhatsApp's functions are so simple compared with WeChat.

But now William Chen has no such concerns at all. HOLA can completely increase the function of the circle of friends, which belongs to social sharing between acquaintances, plus the connection between HOLA and Twitter. Twitter belongs to social interaction with strangers, and HOLA circle of friends is two fields , there is no competition, but they can be well combined.

Soon came the day of New Year's Day, and the time officially entered 2010.

William Chen was not surprised to see the New Year's Day event on the event interface of Future Bank, and it was another lucky draw.

It's just that the result of the lottery this time made him a little disappointed. Liuwei Dihuangwan, this is what I'm short of. Could it be that things are going to develop in a strange direction?Now... hey, it's not suitable to expand.

Now that he is in California, Chen William made a trip to Los Angeles. Rick Walton invested 3000 million U.S. dollars in MGM to ensure that the film company, which was struggling, would be able to make money at the high price of 35 billion U.S. dollars. Under debt, stick to this year.

The ideal is very good, but then MGM encountered the subprime mortgage crisis again, and their creditors were all very difficult under this situation.

For MGM, two companies, Universal and Lionsgate, made offers. Universal bought it in cash, but the $15 billion offer made the creditors a little dissatisfied, thinking it was far below their expectations.

Although Lionsgate's offer is slightly higher, they are planning to make an acquisition through a share exchange, so this method will not help MGM's current predicament much.

Those creditors are not stupid. You use stocks to buy, but in the end debts still exist, and these debts may even accumulate, and there is no possibility of good development at all.

But it was at that time, and now that the economic crisis has arrived, the creditors are in a worse situation. Even if they want to accept Universal's offer of 15 billion US dollars, the other party will not continue, because they must first ensure that they survive the crisis. just work.

Therefore, under such circumstances, as soon as Goldman Sachs representative William Chen contacted MGM, he was welcomed by creditors.Chen William, has been making large acquisitions recently, and has sufficient funds. If he can be allowed to take over MGM, it is very likely that their debts can be recovered. It is better than letting MGM go bankrupt and reorganize.

On the day of bankruptcy and reorganization, it is really not certain how much debt they can get back.

(End of this chapter)