Microsoft announced that it would purchase Nuance Communications, a speech recognition company, for $56 per share, pushing the deal at roughly $16 billion ($19 billion, including debt).
The Burlington-based company Nuance Communications is mainly known for its Dragon software which “uses deep learning to transcribe speech and improves its accuracy over time by adapting to a user’s voice.” It is used for various services and apps, including Apple’s Siri.
Microsoft’s Nuance acquisition is its second largest after the $26 billion deal with LinkedIn in 2016. Moreover, it comes when speech tech is rapidly evolving due to the progress made in AI.
According to experts, for Microsoft, which gets 2/3 of its revenue from software sales and cloud computing, it will be a natural move to improve and implement the new technology to its existing software like Teams or Azure cloud business.
This is not Microsoft’ first purchase this year. Last month it bought ZeniMax – a games company – for $7.5 billion.
Following the news, Nuance stock price went up 15.95%, while Microsoft closed 0.02% higher.
Sources: theverge.com, finance.yahoo.com