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Vaibhav Srivastava 
14 April 2021Microsoft has recently made an announcement that it is all set to acquire one of the most distinguished artificial intelligence (AI) based speech recognition firms Nuance Communications for a whopping $19.7 billion which is roughly around 1,47,900 crores in the Indian currency.
Nuance is an Artificial Intelligence firm that is out of Boston, America and is mainly into the business of selling transcription and audio recognition tools. It was incepted in 1992 and has an employee strength of more than 7,000. The company has logged $346 million in its fourth-quarter revenues. However, the deal which is the second biggest acquisition by Microsoft after LinkedIn in 2016 is expected to be completed sometime later in 2021. The current CEO of Nuance Communications, Mark Benjamin will further remain its CEO but he will report to Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie who is working as Executive VP of Cloud & AI. It’s thought that Microsoft has acquired Nuance with an aim to boost its cloud healthcare business.
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Both the companies are already having a professional relationship and have worked collaboratively on a range of technologies that allow medical professionals to pick voice conversations and automatically feed them into medical records electronically.
“Nuance provides the AI layer at the healthcare point of delivery and is a pioneer in the real-world application of enterprise AI. AI is technology’s most important priority, and healthcare is its most urgent application. Together, with our partner ecosystem, we will put advanced AI solutions into the hands of professionals everywhere to drive better decision-making and create more meaningful connections, as we accelerate growth of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and Nuance” said Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft CEO.
Currently, Nuance’s technology is in use by over 75 per cent of radiologists and 55 per cent of physicians in the US. Microsoft said that this deal would strengthen its prospective healthcare market to $500 billion. On the other hand, Microsoft also sees this opportunity to not just use it in the healthcare sector but also using similar AI transcriptions in the financial sector as well.
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