The deal, which was announced last year, helps Microsoft get
more entrenched into hospitals and the health care industry through Nuance's
widely used medical dictation and transcription tools. The acquisition is
Microsoft's second-largest after its $26 billion purchase of career networking
service LinkedIn in 2016.
Nuance's artificial intelligence technology helped power
Apple's Siri digital voice assistant upon its release on iPhones more than a
decade ago. The Burlington, Massachusetts-based company has since shifted to
focus on physicians and other tailored uses of its Dragon line of voice
recognition tools.
Microsoft announced it was buying the company in April 2021
but faced a setback in December when British antitrust regulators said they
were opening an investigation into whether it could result in a “substantial
lessening of competition” in the UK market. The British agency announced it
cleared that deal Wednesday.
The merger was separately cleared later in December by regulators
in the European Union, which Britain left in 2020. The EU's top antitrust
authority said Microsoft and Nuance “offer very different products” and would
continue to face strong competition in their respective markets.
Microsoft continued to shop this year, in January announcing
that it would spend nearly $70 billion to acquire video game maker Activision
Blizzard.
Mark Benjamin will continue to serve as CEO of Nuance and
report to Scott Guthrie, the head of Microsoft's cloud computing and AI
division.
Shares of Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, declined slightly amid a broader market sell-off Friday.
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