Microsoft to Buy Nuance for $16 Billion to Focus on Health Care Tech

By acquiring a provider of artificial-intelligence software, the tech giant is hoping to bolster its offerings for the fast-growing field of medical computing.

Microsoft said on Monday that it would buy Nuance Communications, a provider of artificial-intelligence and speech-recognition software, for about $16 billion, as it pushes to expand its health care technology services. In acquiring Nuance, whose products include the transcription tool Dragon, Microsoft is hoping to bolster its offerings for the fast-growing field of medical computing. Nuance has an established set of customers as well as a wide array of speech and text data related to health care, which is often a vital part of building new systems. Microsoft and Nuance have been working together since 2019, but the acquisition signals that Microsoft has bigger ambitions for Nuance’s technology. Microsoft has been making large investments in industry-specific cloud technology, including health care, finance and retail.