Nuance, the company behind Siri’s backend, has been acquired by Microsoft in a massive deal that the company claims would usher in a “new age of outcomes-based AI.”
“Completion of this significant and strategic acquisition brings together Nuance’s best-in-class conversational AI and ambient intelligence with Microsoft’s secure and trusted industry cloud offerings,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of the Cloud + AI Group at Microsoft.
“This powerful combination will help providers offer more affordable, effective, and accessible healthcare, and help organisations in every industry create more personalised and meaningful customer experiences. I couldn’t be more pleased to welcome the Nuance team to our Microsoft family.”
The speech recognition engine that powers Apple’s smart assistant, Siri, made Nuance a household name (at least among techies). Nuance, on the other hand, has been in the speech recognition business since 2001 under the name ScanSoft.
Despite the fact that it hasn’t made many huge headlines in recent years, Nuance has continued to make amazing breakthroughs, which has drawn Microsoft’s notice.
Last year, Microsoft revealed its desire to buy Nuance for $19.7 billion, making it the company’s second-largest deal after the $26.2 billion purchase of LinkedIn (both agreements would be blown out of the water by Microsoft’s projected $70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard).
Regulators examined whether there may be anti-competition concerns in some verticals where both companies are active, such as healthcare. However, after investigation, the regulators determined that competition shouldn’t be affected by the deal.
The EU, for example, determined that “competing transcription service providers in healthcare do not depend on Microsoft for cloud computing services” and that “transcription service providers in the healthcare sector are not particularly important users of cloud computing services”.