According to The Financial Times, US IT giant Microsoft intends to buy speech recognition company Nuance Communications. The deal is worth about $16 billion.

News about the deal appeared last week. Both companies are ready to sign the agreement. "With this sale, we will reach an important milestone in our journey towards a more focused strategy of advancing our Conversational AI, natural language understanding and ambient clinical intelligence solutions," Nuance CEO Mark Benjamin said.

Headquartered in Massachusetts, Nuance Communications is a manufacturer of computer software and related hardware. The corporation's innovative technologies were used in the development of the Siri virtual assistant for Apple.

However, over the past few years, Nuance Communications' revenue has declined markedly. As a result, the acquisition offer from Microsoft is the best way out to stay afloat and continue its work. "Today’s acquisition announcement represents the latest step in Microsoft’s industry-specific cloud strategy. The acquisition also builds on several integrations and partnerships the two companies have made in the last couple of years," Nuance stressed.

The acquisition of Nuance Communications is also beneficial to Microsoft. The corporation will attract new clients and investors from other industries such as healthcare, finance, and telecommunications.

Importantly, Microsoft has recently been actively buying up companies to expand its business. In 2016, the corporation acquired the rights to LinkedIn. The transaction amount was $26 billion. In 2018, the IT giant bought web service GitHub for $7.5 billion and ZeniMax, a leading developer of computer games, for a similar amount at the end of 2020.