Although Microsoft's assistant Cortana is no longer a priority at Satya Nadella's company (removed the application from the App Store earlier this month and in Windows has its days numbered), it seems that those of Redmond do not abandon the idea of virtual assistants after announcing the purchase of Nuance.
Microsoft has announced the purchase of Nuance, the company that helped Apple create Siri, for $ 19.700 billion, thus confirming the rumors that had surfaced this past weekend. The agreement sets the price per share at $ 56, which means 23% more than the Nuance share at the close last Friday.
Mark Benjamin, current CEO of Nuance, remain in position and report directly to Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft.
If the regulatory authorities do not find any impediment to proceed with the purchase, this will take place before the end of 2021. Once completed, it will mark Microsoft's second major purchase after the $ 2016 billion purchase of LinkedIn in 24.000.
Nuance is known for its speech recognition systems, a technology that allows computers to interpret speech into text for processing. This technology was a critical component of Apple's Siri assistant in 2013.
Microsoft's interest in Nunace is focused on health, due to the company's experience as a 'cloud-based ambient clinical intelligence and conversational AI provider for healthcare providers', including working with electronic health records and operating many of its services using Azure, Microsoft's cloud storage service.
The purchase of Nuance could not be the last, as various rumors suggest that it is holding conversations with the Discord platform, a platform widely used in the video game industry and for which Microsoft could pay 10.000 billion dollars.