On December 22, the European Commission unconditionally approved Microsoft's acquisition of nuance, a speech recognition technology company, for us $16 billion. It is reported that nuance is a provider of conversational artificial intelligence and environmental clinical intelligence. The company provides its customers with a range of products and services, including clinical documents, solutions for clinicians, radiologists and nursing teams, as well as intelligent customer engagement and safe biometric solutions for various brands. At present, nuance has been listed on NASDAQ with the latest market value of US $17.634 billion. According to the latest financial report, in fiscal year 2021, the company realized an operating revenue of US $1.362 billion. After acquiring LinkedIn for us $26.2 billion in 2016, the acquisition became the second largest acquisition transaction in Microsoft's history. Previously, the transaction had been approved by regulators in the United States and Australia. Microsoft clearly sees the potential market of the medical industry. In 2019, Microsoft launched Microsoft cloud for healthcare (Microsoft cloud health platform). Nuance also migrated some infrastructure and managed products to this cloud platform, and jointly developed industrial applications such as clinical intelligent identification technology. After this acquisition, Microsoft will further expand its business with nuance. Microsoft said that the acquisition of nuance is planned to be completed by the end of this year For the medical and health industry, intelligent services are indeed becoming more and more important. A 2016 study found that doctors spend an average of 1 hour in face-to-face communication with each patient and 2 hours in computer paperwork. The University of Wisconsin found that the average working day of doctors has reached 11.5 hours. Dragon Medical one, a product of nuance, is a voice recognition service specially created for the medical community, so that doctors can use voice recognition to record patients' diseases, and can be used as a voice interface for doctors' voice control software. In addition to voice intelligent services, nuance also extends to more medical information services, including EHR management, registration system, human resources system, etc. "It is obvious that healthcare organizations that accelerate digital investment can improve the treatment effect of patients and reduce costs on a large scale. Advances such as artificial intelligence will have a great impact on enhancing human capacity in healthcare. Artificial intelligence is the top priority of technology, and healthcare is its most urgent application." For the acquisition, Microsoft CEO Satya NADELLA said. It is worth mentioning that in addition to joining the medical service, Microsoft seems to be on the game field of AI voice technology. According to the statistics of Huaxi Securities, nuance occupies 31.6% of the global intelligent voice market. It once provided voice recognition technology for Apple Siri. However, since 2015, Apple has established a voice technology R & D team and poached nuance's voice technology developers. As early as 2004, Google poached Mike Cohen, nuance's co-founder, as its voice technology director. In 2016, Google opened the voice recognition API to third-party developers for free. Nuance's voice technology monopoly is constantly being broken, and Microsoft is trying to slow down the steps of apple and Google in the intelligent voice market through mergers and acquisitions. It is understood that the current global intelligent voice market accounts for 22% of the total market size of the AI industry, second only to 37% of machine vision, which means that in addition to the AI medical industry, there is still a lot of room for intelligent voice to play. Microsoft's layout is obviously ready to enter the track early. After all, on the road of accelerating AI commercialization, enterprises need not only subdivided markets, but also quick "first opportunity". (Xinhua News Agency)