 |
| Microsoft acquired Nuance for $ 19.7 billion |
Microsoft announced the acquisition of Nuance, an artificial intelligence and speech technology company, for $ 19.7 billion to boost the software giant's speech recognition capabilities and cement its influence in the medical market as Nuance sells multiple products.
Microsoft will buy Nuance shares at $ 56 per share, up 23% from the company's closing price on Friday, including Nuance's net debt.
Nuance's most popular Dragon software uses deep learning to transcribe speech and improves its accuracy by adapting it to the user's language.
Nuance has licensed the technology for a variety of services and applications, including Apple's digital assistant, Siri.
The acquisition of Microsoft for $ 19.7 billion is the second largest after Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $ 26 billion in 2016.
Due to the boom in AI deep learning, this was achieved as language technology rapidly evolved and there were more ways to use it at the same time.
From medical consulting to board meetings to academic conferences, digital transcription is becoming more reliable in a variety of fields.
The emergence of remote work has also opened up new opportunities, and thanks to the many video conferencing, it has become easier to provide written copies to clients through the programs included in those calls.
By integrating with third-party services (such as Otter), the Zoom platform provides automatic transcription functionality.
For Microsoft, improving copy services is very important. For Microsoft, roughly two-thirds of its revenue comes from selling business and cloud computing software.
The company can integrate Nuance technology with its existing software (such as teams) or deploy it independently as part of its Azure cloud business.
As the two companies worked together in 2019 to use Nuance to digitize Microsoft's customer health records, the current focus will likely be on healthcare.
The report shows that Nuance's health technology, including the Dragon Medical One platform, has been fine-tuned for defining medical terminology and used by more than half a million physicians worldwide and 77% of hospitals in the United States.