Microsoft buys AI firm Nuance

Microsoft, on an accelerated growth push, is buying speech recognition company Nuance in a deal worth about $16 billion.

Nuance, based in Burlington, Mass., has been one of the pioneers of commercial voice recognition technology and helped power Apple’s Siri voice assistant. It has since shifted its focus to health care, including a product that can listen in on exam room conversations between physician and patient and write up the doctor’s recommendations.

The acquisition comes after the companies formed a partnership in 2019. Microsoft said that the deal will double its potential market in the health care provider industry to nearly $500 billion.

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.

“AI is technology’s most important priority, and healthcare is its most urgent application,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement.

Aside from health care, Nuance provides voicerelated AI technology in other products, including security features that can recognize individual voices so they can unlock an account or enter a building.