Why Microsoft's new AI acquisition is a big deal

Microsoft's recent shopping spree reached a new climax this week with the announcement of its $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance, a company that provides speech recognition and conversational AI services. Nuance is best known for its deep learning voice transcription service, which is very popular in the health care sector. The two companies had already been working together closely before the acquisition. Nuance had built several of its products on top of Microsoft's Azure cloud. And Microsoft had been using Nuance's Dragon service in its Cloud for Healthcare solution, which launched last year in the midst of the pandemic.