Microsoft is in advanced talks to acquire Nuance Communications, an artificial intelligence firm whose speech recognition technology has contributed to its development Apple’s Siri Virtual Assistant, for up to $ 16 billion, said a source familiar with the matter Reuters.
The negotiated trading price could value Nuance at about $ 56 per share, the source said, about 23% premium compared to the closing price of the stock on Friday. They added that an official announcement could appear immediately after Monday.
A source who spoke to Bloomberg, who first reported news of a potential deal on Sunday said negotiations were ongoing and warned it could fall apart.
Although not exactly a household name, Nuance’s AI and speech recognition software is used in a wide range of industries, from healthcare to cars and has helped lay the groundwork for the technology that powers Apple’s voice assistant.
Neither Microsoft nor Nuance have publicly confirmed these discussions, so it is best to take all this with a grain of salt for now. However, the two companies have a bit of history working together. In 2019, Microsoft has announced a collaboration with Nuance to build technology that allows physicians to record conversations with their patients during visits and automatically relay this information to electronic medical records.
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“The Microsoft partnership will accelerate our ability to address the most pressing healthcare challenges – together,” said Nuance CEO Mark Benjamin. “The environmental technologies we provide together can improve productivity and job satisfaction, while allowing physicians to focus on what they do best: caring for patients.”
It is rumored that Microsoft is currently spending little. He also seems to be looking at the chat platform focused on games Discord for more than $ 10 billion in just a few months after it assembled the video game holding company ZeniMax Media. If this Nuance transaction goes through, it would be one of Microsoft’s biggest acquisitions to date, second only to the acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016 for $ 26.2 billion.