Microsoft's $19.7 Billion Nuance Acquisition Wins EU Approval

The European Commission has approved Microsoft's $19.7 billion bid to buy Nuance Communications. Engadget reports: The regulator said on Tuesday the proposed acquisition "would raise no competition concerns" within the European Union. In analyzing the bid, it found that "Microsoft and Nuance offer very different products." Moreover, it believes the company will continue to face "strong" competition from other firms in the future. Before today, the US and Australia had both signed off on the purchase, but it's not yet a done deal. On December 13th, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority said it would investigate the transaction. With the regulator accepting public comments until January 10th, 2022, it's unlikely the deal will close by the end of 2021 as Microsoft had said it would when it first announced its intention to buy Nuance. In April, Microsoft agreed to acquire the speech-to-text software company, claiming the acquisition was about increasing its presence in the healthcare vertical.

The problem is in competition

[rsilvergun]

With Microsoft's products. The problem is that a handful of very large companies who have unlimited amounts of cash or buying literally everything. I don't know about the rest of you but there's only two grocery stores where I am. There's several different brands but they're owned by two parent companies. After the consolidation prices shot way up. If you want to know why inflation is a problem that's why. If you want to know why wages are going down that's why. When we let a handful of people buy up all the it companies that we could potentially work for they can decide on salaries for virtually everyone.

The real problem with wealth inequality isn't some nebulous concept of social justice from some blue haired college chick, the problem wealth inequality causes is that it puts a massive amount of power in too few hands. Like the old golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.

Re:

[fustakrakich]

Federal Reserve is stuffing these people full of cash, it's gotta go somewhere, kinda like the way car dealerships exchange inventory, make it look like they're doing something productive.

That wouldn't be an issue

[rsilvergun]

if we just took it back in the form of taxes. The fed needs to keep the money supply flowing or the economy slows down. The problem we have is that we don't have any systems to spread that money around. Quite the opposite actually, we've built a ton of new systems for moving it to the top.

Money is power. Never forget that. If you let a small group of people have it all you've let them have all the power.

Re:

[fustakrakich]

Money is power.

No, money is inanimate... Desire is power. The correct saying goes: The love of money is the root of all evil.

Now bring back the legacy speech engines

[kriston]

Now bring back the legacy speech engines that Nuance killed off when they acquired most of their competitors. At least two of them (Loquendo and IBM) were far better and had much better quality voices and lexicons than the current Nuance voice synthesizer platform does.

Re:

[BoogieChile]

Like anything but Microsoft killing off Nuance's speech engine and leaving nothing but their own, even lower quality versions, is what's really going to happen...

Re:

[Ksevio]

Working with their software is so strange since it's such a mix of technologies absorbed over the years, but they really had the best - especially if you're looking for a variety of voices. Interestingly, they spun off the non-cloud based TTS software into a new company called "Cerence" just before Microsoft acquired them which remains independent.

That being said, I think the future of TTS technology is going to be moving more into voice cloning as developments in that have skyrocketed in recent years

Re:

[kriston]

Very interesting! Which engine powers the Cerence voices? It's hard to tell from their web site.

Re:

[Ksevio]

It's their "Vocalizer Expressive" engine, just the embedded version (i.e. not server based).

Re:

[kriston]

Do you know if that is one of Nuance's own or one of the acquired ones?

Re:

[Ksevio]

It's a bit hard to tell. Based on when they released it and that it uses L&H dictionaries, it's probably technology from Loquendo

Shouldn't have happened.

[Virtucon]

Nuance absorbed competitors in the speech recognition game and was the defacto standard. Their patent portfolio is huge in this area and it's difficult to innovate in the IVR field without running into one of their "innovations." I can't see how this was allowed to happen other than lax regulators not doing their job.

Am I reading this right?

[cloud.pt]

Microsoft paid 20B for a company that does speech2text?.. But why?

Re:

[nagora]

Microsoft paid 20B for a company that does speech2text?.. But why?

Patents.

Different markets

[xalqor]

Operating systems and browsers, browsers and search engines, these are also different markets where Microsoft (and others) find ways to leverage their dominance in one market to abuse customers of another market. Being in different markets should be a red flag instead of a reason to allow it.