Microsoft Moves Into AI Speech Tech With Latest Acquisition

A big part of Microsoft’s strategy after its brief risk of fading into obscurity in the late 2000s has involved major acquisitions. The acquisition of LinkedIn allowed Microsoft to move into social media, and the platform has thrived under Microsoft ownership. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Microsoft is not stopping there. The latest acquisition made by the tech giant is second only to LinkedIn in terms of overall cost to the company, and it involves a completely different sector of the tech industry.

The latest firm that has been acquired by Microsoft is called Nuance, and it specializes in AI based speech tech with an emphasis on voice recognition. The acquisition cost Microsoft just under $20 billion, so it’s clear that the tech giant is placing a lot of stock in the future of this industry. It’s easy to see why, too. Amazon has its speech tech experimentation with Alexa, Apple has Siri, and Google has multiple horses in the race. Microsoft might be late to the party, as it usually is, but this doesn’t mean that it won’t be able to succeed in this regard.

Nuance’s Dragon software has been making waves for its accurate speech transcription, and its machine learning helps make it so that very specific accents and speech patterns can be uncovered as long as users use it often enough. This might also allow Microsoft to diversify into health tech which is a sector that gets a lot of use out of speech transcription and the like. This is an area that its competitors have not moved into all that aggressively as of yet which gives Microsoft the chance to do something that other major corporations in its industry have not yet been able to innovate in which could potentially tip the scales in the future.

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