SiliconANGLE @theCUBE is in Boston this week for the #HPBigData2013 Vertica user conference exploring the cutting edge of big data.  We also made a visit to MIT to meet the MITIQ team to talk about the expanding and changing role of the Chief Data Officer (CDO).  

Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Nuance, Microsoft all have presence near MIT.  That shouldn’t be surprising because MIT is a great tech school. What is surprising is what comes out of MIT that isn’t really available anywhere else. Natural Language Understanding experts powering a big data driven modern computing era.

Siri opened our eyes to what it could be like to talk to our phones, not just on our phones. Google Glass is taking that a step farther building interfaces that work with voice alone. Hands free is the way technology is going, and there is a rush to get the top talent before the competition.

Apple hasn’t typically maintained many engineering teams far from its corporate headquarters in Cupertino. Apple has put its Speech team in Boston because that is the only place to find talent, and some of that talent is still in school.  Boston is also the home to Nuance which has been providing the Speech to Text capabilities of Siri and other applications on both iPhone and Android. Clearly Apple wants to get out of bed with Nuance. Which makes sense. You can’t be better than everyone if you all run the same technology.

For Microsoft’s part it launched the NERD Center in Boston. (really that’s what it is called) TJ Hazen leads the new NERD initiative with a mission “to advance the state of the art in making all kinds of software easier, more natural and more intuitive to use, with a particular emphasis on speech and language processing capabilities.”

Amazon not wanting to be left out of the party has 130,000 square feet at its 101 Main Street, Cambridge location which has a directive to “push the envelope in automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural language understanding (NLU), and audio signal processing”.

This isn’t to say that the only place to get such talent is MIT. Stremor, a small startup in Scottsdale AZ, boasts an impressive set of language processing tools built by a small team. “It’s a question of build, buy, hire, or train,” says Stremor CTO Brandon Wirtz, “I have a team that learned to do natural language on the job. The advantage is that each team member has a specialty, and we can play off of each other, and build things that leverage the tool each of us understand the best. I like the idea of having MIT alumni, but I have a Stanford enrollee that learns faster than most professors could research, that gives us the ability to build fast, for less.”

When asked who the potential clients for Natural Language Understanding are, Wirtz explained, “Everyone. If you are an Android device manufacturer you want to take the revenue you are giving to Google and keep it for yourself, and you want to differentiate from everyone else.” With the exception of the top end devices most phones are commodity hardware now. Devices have the same features, run the same software, and the things that differentiate are price, and manufacturer exclusive software. If phones can capture more of the transactional revenue from ads, shopping, and travel purchase they can charge less for a phone, and make more money over the life of the device.

This is why there is such a rush for talent in the space. When a user makes a reservation for a restaurant the software provider gets a commission on the booking. These transactions can often be more money than the sale price of the device, which is exactly why Google is in the software business.

Nuance paid $293 Million for VoiceSignal Technologies in 2007, and is the big fish on the block, but there is completion coming, and it is starting with MIT students, graduates, and alumni.

As big data gets all the attention technology like natural language understanding and machine learning are exploding in usage and popularity among computer scientists.  This trend makes it an exciting time to be an entrepreneur building a business or existing business rebuilding.

Check out our live coverage of #HP Vertica User Conference on SiliconANGLE.tv #HPBigData2013.  Follow us on twitter @theCUBE @SiliconANGLE or @Furrier.