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Microsoft is to buy Nuance Communications for $19.7bn in a bid to bolster its healthcare product line with AI conversational smarts. The deal, which will see Microsoft purchase Nuance for $56 per share (a 23 per cent premium on Friday’s closing price), includes Nuance’s net debt. The move is not entirely surprising. The companies announced a partnership in the healthcare space in 2019 and Microsoft plans to plug Nuance’s tech into the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare which, Microsoft reckons, will double its Total Addressable Market to almost $500bn. The acquisition, dwarfed only by the $26.2bn purchase of LinkedIn back in 2016, comes almost three decades after Nuance launched. Register readers might be more familiar with Nuance’s Dragon line of speech recognition products, which were first acquired by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products and later folded into Nuance.
