Microsoft has announced the acquisition of Nuance, an artificial intelligence company specializing in speech recognition, for a record amount.
Microsoft buys Nuance
Another Internet giant buys a new company to further strengthen its position. In this case, in the enterprise software sector, where Microsoft is one of the undisputed leaders.
Microsoft has paid no less than $19.7 billion for Nuance, an artificial intelligence company known worldwide for its Dragon voice recognition software, which uses the Siri voice assistant, for example. But it also has a significant presence in the healthcare industry.
It is Microsoft’s second most expensive acquisition after LinkedIn, for which it paid $26 billion. For GitHub, it paid $7.5 billion, almost the same amount as for Bethesda… The list is quite long.
Although most people use Microsoft products such as Office, Windows, or even its Xbox consoles, the truth is that 75% of its revenue comes from its enterprise software and its cloud platform, Azure. And from this point of view, it is quite a coherent and strategic acquisition.
As we have explained, Nuance is the world’s leading company with its Dragon speech recognition software, which uses artificial intelligence to adapt to the listener. Microsoft will take great advantage of this software by integrating it into its enterprise applications.
You can use it in Teams to transcribe video calls to text, or in Office to transcribe dictation to speech. It also has applications in customer service, online stores, and other business software where Microsoft develops software for all types of businesses.
Also, Nuance has speech recognition platforms specialized in clinical terms that are used by hospitals around the world to transcribe medical records, reducing paperwork and time spent documenting surgical operations, patient care, etc., by more than 45%.
Thanks to this purchase, Microsoft strengthens its position in the healthcare sector, an increasingly high-tech industry in which digitalization, remote care, and artificial intelligence will play a very important role in the coming decades.
