Microsoft is in advanced talks to buy AI speech recognition company Nuance Communications, according to Bloomberg sources.
The deal being mooted places a value on Nuance of approx $56 a share, giving Nuance a value of about $16 billion.
Nuance provides audio recognition and transcription tools including Dragon speech-recognition software. It was founded in 1992, and has over 7,000 employees.
Microsoft and Nuance have collaborated since 2019 on technologies such as allowing doctors to capture voice conversations from patient visits and enter the data into electronic medical records.