Microsoft is Acquiring Nuance Communications for $19.7 Billion

Microsoft agreed today to acquire Nuance Communications, a leader in speech to text software, for $19.7 billion. From a report: In a post announcing the deal, the company said this was about increasing its presence in the healthcare vertical, a place where Nuance has done well in recent years. In fact, the company announced the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare last year, and this deal is about accelerating its presence there. Nuance's products in this area include Dragon Ambient eXperience, Dragon Medical One and PowerScribe One for radiology reporting. "Today's acquisition announcement represents the latest step in Microsoft's industry-specific cloud strategy," the company wrote. The acquisition also builds on several integrations and partnerships the two companies have made in the last couple of years. The company boasts 10,000 healthcare customers, according to information on the website. Those include AthenaHealth, Johns Hopkins, Mass General Brigham and Cleveland Clinic to name but a few, and it was that customer base that attracted Microsoft to pay the price it did to bring Nuance into the fold.

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[slaker]

That's reasonable. I know a number of physicians who use Dragon Naturally Speaking on Windows devices to make their notes.

On the other hand, I am hopeful that this will finally give me a direct path to transfer my Swype dictionary directly to Swiftkey, since Swype is no longer being updated on Android.

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[EvilSS]

I think this is in regards to speech-to-text for medical transcription. Diagnosis to medical code for billing and such.

Yep. Medical is Nuance's largest market. They pretty much abandoned their non-pro individual offerings years ago (a pro individual license will run you $500 these days).

I'll be really interested to see what MS does with them. I can absolutely see the individual pro getting rolled into Office 365 offerings, with their large enterprise offerings probably staying separate products.

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[comodoro]

Yep. Medical is Nuance's largest market. They pretty much abandoned their non-pro individual offerings years ago (a pro individual license will run you $500 these days).

I had to check and you are right. The same version 15 (minus several minor updates, two I think) I have bought for $300 in 2018 is now being sold for $500.

Speech recognition is ideed getting better and less complex. With enough data and computing power nowadays it is quite possible to create a reasonable model, and you do not have to be a scientist.

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[EvilSS]

I had the last consumer version they put out. Became worthless about a year later when they stopped supporting it and it was incompatible with the new version of Office. Their suggested solution? "Buy the pro version".

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[comodoro]

I have never cared for their application-specific support (mainly just Office and some browsers), but I hear it is often buggy anyway. They had a crippled Home 15 version for $150 which I tried, but was too limited for my purposes (mainly Natlink/Dragonfly/Caster). The Pro version is for consumers just as well and in my view good value for the money then; now I would think twice about it.

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[omnichad]

They're probably buying for the clients. Although their voice model might have some value.

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[jellomizer]

A lot of the older doctors who refuse to use Electronic Medical Records where about 30 seconds - 5 minutes of tap - tap - tap that could make a a complete Medical Record, that is coded and formatted in a way that can allow the services to be billed out, recorded and managed as well with analytics that can help the healthcare institution look at the population as a whole. And go back to taking about 5-10 minutes to give a full transcription like they are use to, in which that data still need to get importe

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[cmseagle]

CPT Codes performed, which ICD-10 Diagnosis were for each procedure, the level of complexity. Codes for medical history... Text to Speech is only the first part of these products, the system also takes all the stuff they said, and breaks it down to necessary parts of the medical record.

That sort of Natural Language Processing is the direction Nuance is heading, but it's far from widely adopted. The implementation I'm familiar with still requires the user to reconcile the discrete data back into the chart (because we're a long, long way from NLP being so trustworthy that you can blindly file the diagnoses/meds/allergies it gives you), so there's questionable benefit over just discretely documenting the info in the first place.

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[jellomizer]

I am not disagreeing with you, however you should have coders and other employees double checking what the providers enter into the EHR as well.

Nuisance Communications

[HanzoSpam]

At first glance, I read this as "Microsoft agreed today to acquire Nuisance Communications". Which, I submit, would have been a much better fit for Microsoft.

Big Consolidation

[Ksevio]

In the voice recognition and text-to-speech world, Nuance has been the behemoth of the industry buying up lots of the smaller companies and combining them into their own product. They did just split off a section of their TTS embedded offerings into a new company "Cerence" so I wonder if that'll stay separate or also be bought up again.

Microsoft and Nuance share an office park in Burlington MA so I wonder if they've been eying them across the parking lot...

Microsoft speech to text

[Rogue Pat]

Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all

Hey, let's let oligopolies get oligopolier.

[Tablizer]

Brilliant! What can possibly go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong...

IP or predation?

[groobly]

Is this an admission by MS that their speech IP sucks, despite poaching lots of researchers from academia, or just a way to eliminate competition?

Nuance killed by Microsoft

[WaffleMonster]

Good riddance. Nuance single handedly destroyed the speech recognition industry. I hope MS fires all of their bean counters.