Microsoft buying speech recognition firm Nuance
Microsoft, on an accelerated growth push, is buying speech recognition company Nuance in a deal worth about $16 billion.
The acquisition will get Microsoft deeper into hospitals and the health care industry through Nuance’s widely used medical dictation and transcription tools.
Microsoft will pay $56 per share cash. That’s a 23% premium to Nuance’s Friday closing price. The companies value the transaction including debt at $19.7 billion.
Shares of Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance surged more than 16% in Monday trading.
Nuance has been a pioneer in voice-based artificial intelligence technology and was instrumental in helping to power Apple’s digital assistant Siri. It has since shifted its focus to health care, including a product that listens in on exam room conversations between physicians and patients and automatically writes up the doctor’s recommendations.
“This clinical documentation essentially writes itself, giving physicians time back to focus on patient care,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on a conference call about the deal Monday.
Microsoft and Nuance had already formed a business partnership in 2019. That relationship grew during the pandemic, enabling Nuance to bring its patientphysician transcription services into telehealth appointments on Microsoft Teams. The Redmond, Wash., software giant said that the deal will double its potential market in the health care provider industry to nearly $500 billion.
“Put Microsoft and
Nuance together and it allows Microsoft to go after the exploding health care market, which is on fire right now as it’s modernizing, adopting digital engagement and moving to the cloud,” said Forrester analyst Kate Leggett.
Nuance’s products include clinical speech recognition software offerings such as Dragon Ambient eXperience, Dragon Medical One and PowerScribe, all of which are built on
Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. The companies said Nuance products are used by more than 55% of physicians and 75% of radiologists in the U.S., and by 77% of U.S. hospitals. Its health care cloud revenue grew 37% year-over-year in fiscal 2020.
“AI is technology’s most important priority, and health care is its most urgent application,” Nadella said.