Microsoft closes on $16-billion acquisition of Nuance, the company that once powered Apple Siri

Microsoft has closed on its roughly $16 billion acquisition of speech recognition firm Nuance. The deal, which was introduced final 12 months, helps Microsoft get extra entrenched into hospitals and the well being care trade by means of Nuance’s broadly used medical dictation and transcription instruments. The acquisition is Microsoft’s second-largest after its $26 billion buy of profession networking service LinkedIn in 2016.

Nuance’s synthetic intelligence know-how helped energy Apple‘s Siri digital voice assistant upon its launch on iPhones greater than a decade in the past. The Burlington, Massachusetts-based firm has since shifted to concentrate on physicians and different tailor-made makes use of of its Dragon line of voice recognition instruments.

Microsoft introduced it was shopping for the corporate in April 2021 however confronted a setback in December when British antitrust regulators stated they have been opening an investigation into whether or not it might end in a “substantial lessening of competitors” within the UK market. The British company introduced it cleared that deal Wednesday (March 2).

The merger was individually cleared later in December by regulators within the European Union, which Britain left in 2020. The EU’s high antitrust authority stated Microsoft and Nuance “provide very completely different merchandise” and would proceed to face sturdy competitors of their respective markets.

Microsoft continued to buy this 12 months, in January asserting that it will spend almost $70 billion (roughly Rs. 5,11,000 crore) to accumulate online game maker Activision Blizzard.

Mark Benjamin will proceed to function CEO of Nuance and report back to Scott Guthrie, the top of Microsoft’s cloud computing and AI division.

Shares of Microsoft, based mostly in Redmond, Washington, declined barely amid a broader market sell-off Friday.

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