Microsoft buys Siri co-inventor Nuance for nearly $ 20 billion

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: What does the world cost?

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Nuance Communications is best known for two products, one of which never bore the company's name: the Dragon transcription software and Siri.

Almost exactly ten years ago, Apple was said to be negotiating a takeover with Nuance, but ultimately only Nuance's speech recognition became part of Apple's virtual assistant software.

Microsoft is now taking over the US company based in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Microsoft pays 19.7 billion dollars according to its own information, or 56 dollars per share, which is almost 23 percent above the price on Friday.

Nuance Communications software is used in the healthcare, finance, telecommunications, and retail industries.

The deal fits in with a takeover trend: According to the analysts at GlobalData, Microsoft has already bought twelve other companies that are working on artificial intelligence (AI) in the past five years.

Only Apple, Google and the Irish company Accenture took over even more AI companies at that time, in the case of Apple even 25, Google has bought 14 such companies since 2016.

Right behind Microsoft is Facebook with nine corresponding acquisitions.

Second largest acquisition in Microsoft history

According to GlobalData, the four US tech companies and Accenture also advertised a total of more than 14,000 jobs in the field of AI in the past year alone.

In addition to AI products, they are obviously also interested in talent.

For Microsoft, the acquisition of Nuance, if the competition watchdog allows it, is the 13th in the company's history, for which Microsoft pays a billion sum.

Microsoft only paid more for LinkedIn, the career network was worth $ 27 billion in 2016.

Most recently, Microsoft had taken over the game company Zenimax Media for allegedly 7.5 billion dollars, the deal was approved by the EU Commission in March.

Rumor has it that Satya Nadella's company is also currently interested in buying the Discord chat service for around ten billion dollars.

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