Microsoft is lining up to buy Nuance Communications an AI firm with whom Microsoft partnered in the past around healthcare. If the deal goes through this Nuance will be Microsoft’s second-largest purchase. Microsoft is said to be purchasing Nuance shares at $56, 23% premium as of Friday’s closing stock price. If successful this deal would be worth up to a huge sum of $16 billion.
Nuance is known for selling tools for recognizing and transcribing speech in doctor’s visits, customer service calls, and voicemails. Nuance has worked with several other partners in vertical markets they were involved with Apple building the Siri voice software. Nuance sells products for healthcare, omnichannel customer engagement markets, as well as its Dragon speech recognition technology for consumers and enterprise customers. Back in 2019 Microsoft and Nuance partnered up to deliver an ambient clinical intelligence technology (ACI) both the companies worked together to develop Dragon medial platform with Azure, AI services, and ProjectEmpowerMD intelligent-scribe service, along with various other conversational AI technologies developed by both the companies.
Microsoft would expand its capabilities in voice software after the purchase of Nuance. Microsoft already possesses developer tools that assist applications to transcribe speech into written words, and it incorporates speech recognition into its products. Bloomberg reports suggest that they expect Microsoft to go through the deal within this week.