Microsoft buying speech recognition firm Nuance in $16B deal.
Microsoft announced Monday that it'll buy speech recognition company Nuance Communications for $16 billion, the tech giant's largest acquisition since it bought LinkedIn for quite $26 billion in 2016.
The deal is that the latest sign Microsoft is looking for more growth through acquisitions. the corporate is additionally reportedly in talks to shop for the chat app Discord for about $10 billion and last year tried to shop for TikTok’s U.S. business for about $30 billion before the deal was derailed. Last month, Microsoft acquired gaming company Zenimax for $7.6 billion.
Shares of Nuance were up nearly 23 percent in premarket trading Monday, representing approximately an equivalent premium Microsoft plans to pay supported the price Friday. Trading was halted on the stock then pop and are expected to resume trading around 9 a.m. ET. Microsoft shares were slightly negative.
Nuance would be aligned with the a part of Microsoft’s business that serves businesses and governments. Nuance derives revenue by selling tools for recognizing and transcribing speech in doctor’s visits, customer-service calls and voicemails. In its announcement Monday, Microsoft said Nuance’s technology are going to be wont to augment Microsoft’s cloud products for health care, which were launched last year.
The company reported $7 million in net on about $346 million in revenue within the fourth quarter of 2020, with revenue declining 4 percent on an annualized basis.
Microsoft said Nuance’s CEO Mark Benjamin will remain at the corporate and report back to Scott Guthrie, the Microsoft executive responsible of the company’s cloud and AI businesses.
Nuance features a strong reputation for its voice recognition technology, and it's been considered a purchase target for companies like Apple, Microsoft and more for several years. Microsoft has voice recognition built into many of its products already, but it's recently pack up some products featuring its voice assistant Cortana.
