Dragon Naturally Speaking worked great for me...

bdub77: Accuracy often comes down to microphone. If you buy Dragon for PC, buy a good mic: Sennheiser ME3.

This ^ ^ ^ . If you have some craptastic $5 microphone of course it's not going to work well. I've heard really good things about
this microphone.

Delete! DELETE!

jafiwam: Nope.

Because I am not a retard and can type. Heck, I can type faster than I can talk. People who can't type should stay away from computers.

Just to check, it would still be immoral to hope a chimpanzee pulls your hands off or gives you some muscle wasting disease so you can realize how stupid you sound, right?

MBooda: Theaetetus: MBooda: Goldman-Sachs Lernout & Hauspie fatally screwed them over

RTFA, subby. G-S was, in this case, holding their coats, nothing more.

RTFA, MBooda. G-S was paid 5 million dollars... You think that was for coat-holding?

Not even that. According to what I read (YMMV), it was "for advice". 5 million consultation fee for a $580 million deal makes G-S look like they were doing pro bono.

not really, all the they had to do was verify revenue/liabilities and give their opinion about whether the buyer's stock price was appropriate. that's nice work if you can get it.
but they didn't even do that much.
all they apparently did was say *well your $5 million check cleared, and we think you should go for it!*.

bdub77: Protip, folks: Never do business with Goldman Sachs unless you want to get screwed out of your money. Those guys are professional conmen.

Don't forget realtors.

AgentKGB: Dragon Naturally Speaking worked great for me...

bdub77: Accuracy often comes down to microphone. If you buy Dragon for PC, buy a good mic: Sennheiser ME3.

This ^ ^ ^ . If you have some craptastic $5 microphone of course it's not going to work well. I've heard really good things about
this microphone.

Ahhh. That might have been my problem. I also had fits trying to get NaturallySpeaking to... well, work. But I hadn't considered that it'd be a lifeline for anyone who couldn't type. And of course I was using a crappy mic... :)

This is one lawsuit I where I really hope the plaintiff wins. Their product was really good and it sucks their money got taken by crummy companies.

Good luck on collecting the payout though.

Magorn: TheBigJerk: Magorn: I think if Dragon can get this in front of a jury, Goldman is going to have to write a VERY big check (okay big for anyone BUT Goldman). The fact that Dragon paid $5 million straight up for Goldman's help, and that got them a trio of unsupervised kids who couldn't be bothered to do:

A) basic due dilligence, not even to the level that Goldman's internal investment folks managed to do on the same company and concluded they were fraudulent (and apparently didn't share with anybody-shouldn;t these guys be legally made to become "mandatory reporters" like teachers and therapists when they have evidence of a financial crime?)

B) Show up at critical meetings relevant to the merger because they were "on vacation"

C) disclosure a serious conflict of interest GS had in handling the merger

Should make a rational person wonder what exactly Goldman DID do to earn their five mil?

Yeah, I could see a $1 billion+ verdict, and that's just special damages, given how people feel about GS these days Punitive ones might not be out of the question

Punitive damages are capped now.

Hey, so are regular ones.

Hmm...I don't know enough about this, but I don't like what I know from Exxon's crimes...

Punitives are capped as a "reasonable" multiple of specials. The legit specials in this case could be about $1 billion ($528 million loss on the sale plus interest and attorney's fees to recover it) the Punitives could knock on the door of 3-5 billion without violating the Supreme Court's cap

Cool.

Still don't understand why destroying an entire coast was capped (in terms of regular damages, whatever the proper term for it is) lower than destroying one business, but I assume it has something to do with who owned the legislators when the laws were written.

Goldman-Sachs is like COBRA.

jtown: It was at this meeting that L.& H. proposed shifting the $580 million deal from half stock and half cash to all stock.

Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!

That's the sound of an alarm going off. I'm not even an investing banks guy but I'd watch my cornhole if someone suggested changing the deal like that.

I also don't know what the guys at Dragon were thinking, taking that deal when none of the advisers hired specifically for this purpose were at the meeting.

jafiwam: Nope.

Because I am not a retard and can type. Heck, I can type faster than I can talk. People who can't type should stay away from computers.

If I liked to talk, I wouldn't be working with computers, I'd be a salesweasel or something instead.

And you've completely missed the point.

The issue was the technology that existed in 1999 and the complex algorithms that made it work. The Bakers were pretty smart people. They were smart enough to think up the technology. They were smart enough to know that it was going to be incredibly popular outside of the narrow context that you boxed it into. If you read the article you'll see that the technology was bought a Ford subsidiary (heard of the "Sync" system in Ford vehicles?) and the other by a company with a licensing agreement with Apple (Siri make me sandwich).

They were also smart enough to recognize that they weren't smart enough to work through the complexities of a sale of the company on their own, so they hired G/S. Somebody up-thread equated this to hiring a bodyguard who then stood by and watched them get raped. I'd go further than that. They paid the bodyguard 5 million and for that they got raped and robbed.

I work in IT as well, and have no use for voice recognition technology at work, but I love telling my phone to text my wife while I'm driving and have it do it perfectly.

I think you need to get out more.

If Goldman-Sachs doesn't give a damn about Dragon after being paid $5 million ("small potatoes for Goldman", according to the article), you can be sure they don't give a damn about anyone paying them less.

Interesting and frightening read.

It disturbs me that all too often the people who have a great idea, work to develop that idea into a revolutionary product, then found a company to sell that product - end up having their work taken from them by people claiming to be "job creators".

We need more real capitalists, and far less vultures waiting to feed on them. More importantly, our society needs to value innovation more - and the ability to steal ideas less. Otherwise, the REAL innovators will stop bothering because they know some sociopath with the right connections will just steal their idea.

Magorn:

SO in your twisted world what SHOULD Goildman have been doing if not Vetting the proposed merger partners? What were they doing for their $5 MILLION dollar fee?

They weren't being an accounting firm.

GS did the same thing to the Dragon people that it did with Mortgage-backed securities: they legally profited from someone else's deception and didn't give a shiat because they weren't legally required to give a shiat.

I love that Goldman's defense is, essentially, "we did a deal with Dragon and since they no longer exist as a going concern, you can't do shiat to us". Banksters, indeed.

At this point I'm fairly convinced that Wall St. won't even handle my money incompetently, but that they will actively try to fleece me.

Theaetetus: ... and if so, do you need a coat holder?


I recommend the Modified Wooden Coat Holder.

Lot of antisemitism in this thread...

WarszawaScream: Sad to hear this, always loved Dragon's stuff.

Yeah, me too.

"A few days before that meeting, Mr. Wayner of Goldman told Ms. Baker that he would be away on vacation and couldn't make the session. He also said that he would be unable to call in and that it was pointless to send anybody else from Goldman because there wasn't time to catch up on the deal. It was at this meeting that L.& H. proposed shifting the $580 million deal from half stock and half cash to all stock. The Bakers, with their high-priced investment bankers M.I.A., agreed.

Later, after L.& H. collapsed, Mr. Wayner testified that the bank "did not form a point of view" as to whether an all-stock deal would be risky or advisable for the Bakers. He said he could not remember if it had crossed his mind to warn the Bakers about potential issues with an all-stock deal.

Two weeks after the initial agreement was reached, Mr. Wayner told Ms. Baker that he would be leaving the next day for another vacation. He would not participate in a conference call with L.& H.'s accounting firm, KPMG, that was set up to discuss any open questions about accounting and due diligence. Mr. Berzofsky of Goldman did participate but later acknowledged that he did not raise any concerns. The Bakers say they believed that all issues had been addressed.

Mr. Wayner was still on vacation on March 27, when Dragon's board met to take a final vote on the proposed acquisition. This time, Mr. Fine and Mr. Smith of Goldman attended the meeting, and Mr. Wayner called in from Argentina. No one from Goldman gave a presentation, but minutes from the meeting, taken by Dragon's outside lawyers, indicate that the Goldman bankers expressed confidence that the combination of Dragon and L.& H. would produce a market leader. The board voted unanimously to accept the $580 million all-stock deal."

WTF?! You're paying this guy $5 million to advise you and he takes 2 vacations within 2 weeks of each other...which just happen to coincide with critical meetings concerning the deal? That right there should have been a red-farking-flag that he was a useless, slimy turd.

Amos Quito: Lot of antisemitism in this thread...

huh?

Yeah and they bought the company I work for, ever since, stock and the working conditions have been going down the shiatter! YAY!!!!!

MBooda: Goldman-Sachs Lernout & Hauspie fatally screwed them over

RTFA, subby. G-S was, in this case, holding their coats, nothing more.

Maybe you need to read the article. Dragon hire G-S to assist them with a sales transaction with L&H. G-S had already done their own due diligence investigation into L&H and knew they were frauds. Yet they never told the Bakers, as was their responsibility. G-S got a $5M fee for this; the Bakers got screwed -- by L&H, of course, but G-S sould have prevented this.

jtown: It was at this meeting that L.& H. proposed shifting the $580 million deal from half stock and half cash to all stock.

Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!

That's the sound of an alarm going off. I'm not even an investing banks guy but I'd watch my cornhole if someone suggested changing the deal like that.

Except that Goldman Sachs told Dragon that the stock would go up following the merger, meaning the stock would be worth a lot more than $580 million. GS then gave the board of directors for Dragon the go-ahead nod to complete the deal, failing to inform them of the super-secret investigation that GS did when GS wanted to invest in the other company.

Add in the fact that GS was simultaneously representing Dragon's rival, and you have a case for a severe conflict of interest for GS to see Dragon go belly-up.

GS knowingly committed fraud against Dragon, plain and simple.

almost a decade ago? from what i can tell it was almost two decades ago...

Amos Quito: Lot of antisemitism in this thread...

Aidan: AgentKGB: Dragon Naturally Speaking worked great for me...

bdub77: Accuracy often comes down to microphone. If you buy Dragon for PC, buy a good mic: Sennheiser ME3.

This ^ ^ ^ . If you have some craptastic $5 microphone of course it's not going to work well. I've heard really good things about
this microphone.

Ahhh. That might have been my problem. I also had fits trying to get NaturallySpeaking to... well, work. But I hadn't considered that it'd be a lifeline for anyone who couldn't type. And of course I was using a crappy mic... :)

Strangely enough I don't have any trouble with Dragon speech recognition using the MacBook Pro built-in microphone. In fact, I didn't type this reply, I'm talking instead of typing this.

As far as training goes, all I did was read the introductory text.

It's not 100% perfect, but given that Siri completely misunderstands me, I think it's a huge improvement over where speech recognition technology was the last time I attempted to use it.

/In capitalist America, Goldman Sachs YOU!

It seems from the article GS has some liability here, but may escape some of it. The fact Dragon completed the deal as all-stock rather than the 50/50 deal that was proposed without a rep from GS present should limit the liability

Also, the fact that some investment arm of GS decided to divest themselves of L&H has no real impact. You can't impute the knowledge of a team in one department of the firm onto the whole firm.

I don't goat what you guys on hear are talking boat. I use the vase recognition pogrom that comes with Windows and it works grate. In fact, I'm using it write now. It's really helpful.

Torchsong: I don't goat what you guys on hear are talking boat. I use the vase recognition pogrom that comes with Windows and it works grate. In fact, I'm using it write now. It's really helpful.

Canadian-like speaking detected

Lsherm: The last time I used any of their software was 1996, but it was pretty clear they were onto something big. It worked tons better than anything else at the time.

The company that bought them (Corel?) has been steadily releasing new versions. Corel is where good software goes to die, but they've managed to make it somewhat better at the same time that computer hardware has caught up, enabling much better accuracy much quicker. Siri on a modern PC would actually blow it out of the water, good thing they've only got a crappy Arm chip to work with.

thoreau: I remember Dragon Naturally Speaking as being a great app if you had just one person using it and the time to train it to your voice. It seemed like the sort of thing that, with just a tiny amount of effort by end users, could have led to a complete shift in user interface from keyboards & mice directly to voice controls. I, like pretty much everyone else that tried it, never got around to getting it trained.

Yer right ... I bought Naturally Speaking in the early 90's and was amazed. I installed it and was playing around with it and opened another window to send a buddy an email. One of my kids came in the office and we yakked for a few minutes and when I looked back at my email, all of my side of the conversation was in it. I figured at the time that it would really be a boon for people who did a lot of typing that didn't involve syntax (I was a programmer). I didn't do much with it but last year when I bought my first iPhone, I downloaded a free app called Dragon - also voice recognition. I assumed it was the same vendor.

I used Dragon Naturally Speaking occasionally in Middle School, and it sucked. Very basic sentences and words it was fine at, but punctuation in more complex sentences was awful and any word with more than two or three syllables was likely to be wrong. Not that modern voice recognition is much better.

foxyshadis: Lsherm: The last time I used any of their software was 1996, but it was pretty clear they were onto something big. It worked tons better than anything else at the time.

The company that bought them (Corel?) has been steadily releasing new versions. Corel is where good software goes to die, but they've managed to make it somewhat better at the same time that computer hardware has caught up, enabling much better accuracy much quicker. Siri on a modern PC would actually blow it out of the water, good thing they've only got a crappy Arm chip to work with.

Holy shiat, Corel is still alive.

MugzyBrown: It seems from the article GS has some liability here, but may escape some of it. The fact Dragon completed the deal as all-stock rather than the 50/50 deal that was proposed without a rep from GS present should limit the liability

Also, the fact that some investment arm of GS decided to divest themselves of L&H has no real impact. You can't impute the knowledge of a team in one department of the firm onto the whole firm.

Actually, if you RTFA, there were two reps at the final meeting, and a 3rd was present via conference call. None of them spoke out against the deal, and none of them even hinted to Dragon that the other company's stock was bogus.

Goldman Sachs fed them to the hyenas, and got paid $5mil to do it.

jayhawk88: "Siri like", lol. Dragon was crap. "Oh hey, spend an hour reading War and Peace to train our software, and you'll get an astounding 80% accuracy rate! You'll end up spending 5 hours doing a task you could have done in 30 minutes if you'd just learn to type, but hey, voice!"

Sounds like Siri to me, except that Dragon actually uses voice recognition that actually uses your voice as a template.

FormlessOne: Fluid: What I'm wondering is who the hell still trusts these people. There's a mountain of evidence that they're lying through their teeth and trying to scam their clients, yet someone keeps putting money into them.

Money doesn't care. As long as Goldman Sachs continues to turn a profit for their folks, well, they will continue to demonstrate that money has no morals, no ethics, and no memory.

Could also be some people like me; I inherited some shares of AIG when my grandmother passed away (split with two sisters). I have absolutely no reason to sell it, because of course we all remember when it tanked, and it hasn't recovered. I'm not sure if that counts as 'putting money' into them, but I'm sure some other people are in the same boat.

Same with a few other stocks that were in the inheritance. The only one that's doing well is a tobacco stock, which I hate, but I'm using the dividends to invest in unrelated things for a bit and then I'll get rid of it.

Shazam999: foxyshadis: Lsherm: The last time I used any of their software was 1996, but it was pretty clear they were onto something big. It worked tons better than anything else at the time.

The company that bought them (Corel?) has been steadily releasing new versions. Corel is where good software goes to die, but they've managed to make it somewhat better at the same time that computer hardware has caught up, enabling much better accuracy much quicker. Siri on a modern PC would actually blow it out of the water, good thing they've only got a crappy Arm chip to work with.

Holy shiat, Corel is still alive.

My dad continues to buy Word Perfect from them for some unknown reason. I think it's just that he's been using it for like fifteen years and refuses to learn a new program.

Never used it myself, but other transcriptionists have said it's pretty good as far as VR software goes.

jafiwam: Nope.

Because I am not a retard and can type. Heck, I can type faster than I can talk. People who can't type should stay away from computers.

If I liked to talk, I wouldn't be working with computers, I'd be a salesweasel or something instead.

Yep all those disabled people for whom the computer is their main form of support should just stay away from computers. Sounds great to me.

Sounds like the typical Wall St. Fark over the little guy then let the big guns pick
up the pieces after you have screwed them into bankruptcy. For $5 million I would
have at least expected them to do an little investigation into L&H. Even a half assed
investigation that took all of an hour would have turned up bad things. It sounds like they did jack squat.

Went to high school with Berzofsky. He was a dick back then, too.

rumpelstiltskin: If we set up a gallows pole and hung 10 bankers as a warning to the rest, what are the chances we would hang an innocent person? I'm figuring less than 10%

Well if you hung 10, you'd be hard pressed for, say, an 8% innocence rate.

foxyshadis: Siri on a modern PC would actually blow it out of the water, good thing they've only got a crappy Arm chip to work with.

Siri uploads to whatever server farm does Siri processing (pops); no voice recognition actually happens on the phone.