Home » Microsoft buys Nuance, the company that taught Siri how to recognize us

Microsoft buys Nuance, the company that taught Siri how to recognize us

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A check worth nearly $ 20 billion to take home one of the most interesting companies in the speech recognition industry. This is the operation that Microsoft is closing, grappling with the acquisition of Nuance, a Massachusetts company that has been among the most important companies in the macrocosm of artificial intelligence for years. A move that will allow the Redmond giant a further leap forward, especially in the voice assistance sectors.

The value of the operation

According to rumors, Microsft will pay $ 56 per share of Nuance which is, in fact, 23% higher than the closing price the company had recorded last Friday. The total figure should be around $ 19.7 billion. And this makes Nuance the second most expensive acquisition in history for Microsoft, after the acquisition of LinkedIn (acquired in 2016 for 26 billion). Nuance is best known for its Dragon software which uses deep learning to intuit spoken language and improves its accuracy over time by adapting to a user’s voice. Over the years, Nuance has licensed this technology for many services and applications, including – most famously – Apple’s digital assistant, Siri.

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Golden time for speech recognition

This acquisition comes at a time when speech recognition technology is improving rapidly, thanks to the boom in deep learning in AI, and there are simultaneously more opportunities for its use. In recent times, transcriptions from speech have become very reliable and used in a wide range of contexts: from medical consultations to board meetings, to university lectures. With the pandemic, the increase in remote work has also created new opportunities. Given the many meetings that take place in video conferencing, it is easier to offer customers transcripts via software integrated directly into these calls. Zoom, for example, offers automatic transcription through integration with third-party services such as Otter. And precisely for Zoom, the acquisition of Nuance could be a cure-all. To date, for Microsoft, about two-thirds of its revenue comes from enterprise software sales and cloud computing. So improving its transcription services for scenarios like these seems like a very sensible move. The Redmond company could integrate Nuance technology into its existing software, such as Teams, or offer it independently as part of its Azure cloud business.

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Healthcare applications

The immediate focus, however, will be on health care, where the two companies have already collaborated. In fact, in 2019, Microsoft and Nuance announced a “strategic partnership” to use Nuance software to digitize medical records for Microsoft customers. To date, according to data provided by the two companies, Nuance’s healthcare technology (which includes the Dragon Medical One platform, optimized for identifying medical terminology) is used by more than half a million doctors worldwide and in 77% of hospitals. Americans. “By augmenting the Microsoft cloud for healthcare with Nuance solutions, as well as the benefit of Nuance’s experience and relationships with electronic health record system providers, Microsoft will be able to provide more tools to healthcare professionals through power of ambient clinical intelligence and other cloud services, ”is written in an official post from Microsoft.

All the moves on the Microsoft market

“Nuance is a pioneer in the world of artificial intelligence,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “And artificial intelligence is the most important priority of all technologies, and healthcare is its most urgent application. Together with our ecosystem of partners, we will put intelligent and advanced solutions in the hands of professionals around the world to drive better decision making and create more meaningful connections ”. News of the Nuance acquisition comes at a very vibrant time for Microsoft. In fact, the company has recently completed the acquisition (for 7.5 billion dollars) of the video game company ZeniMax. And again in recent months, once the hypothesis of buying TikTok has faded, he is in talks with Discors for another acquisition that would be around 10 billion dollars.

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