Oversize #23: Microsoft goes all in on healthcare with Nuance

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Editor's note: Last month, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Nuance Communications, a leading speech-recognition company, in an all-cash transaction valued at $19.7 billion—second only to its $26.2 billion deal for LinkedIn in 2016. Over the past few years, Microsoft, under CEO Satya Nadella, has been eyeing significantly larger mergers and acquisitions to expand into high-growth markets. Last year, the company also tried to buy a stake in video-sharing service TikTok’s US operations in a deal reportedly valued between $10 billion and $30 billion. Recently, the company was reported to have held talks to acquire messaging platform Discord for at least $10 billion, which seem to have fallen through.  It’s going well for the company as its stock hit an all-time high recently and it approaches $2 trillion in market value. But still, why would Microsoft pay billions for a speech-recognition company? One thing most reports around the acquisition highlighted was the fact that Nuance powered the speech recognition engine for Apple’s voice assistant, Siri. But this is mostly irrelevant. For one, Apple replaced Nuance with its in-house voice recognition tech years ago. …