Photographer: Simon Dawson / Bloomberg
Photographer: Simon Dawson / Bloomberg
Microsoft Corp. is in advanced talks to buy a company of artificial intelligence and speech technology Nuance Communications Inc., according to people who know the subject.
An agreement could be announced as early as this week, people said, who asked that they not be identified because the information is private. One person said the price being discussed could value Nuance at about $ 56 per share, although the terms could still change.
This would value Nuance’s equity, which laid the groundwork for the technology used in Apple Inc.’s Siri voice software, at about $ 16 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The price would be a 23% premium until Friday’s close for Nuance.
Talks continue and discussions could still unravel, people said.
A Microsoft representative declined to comment. A Nuance spokesman, based in Burlington, Massachusetts, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Shares of Nuance have risen 3.4% this year, giving the company a market value of nearly $ 13 billion, but continuing to outperform the 9.9% jump in the S&P 500 index. Microsoft is up 15%.
Microsoft, with a market value of more than $ 1.93 trillion, remains active on the operations front. Last month, Bloomberg News reported that the software giant was in talks to acquire it Discord Inc., a video game chat community, for more than $ 10 billion. too video game buyer Zenimax Media Inc. for $ 7.5 billion in cash in a deal that closed this year.
A deal for Nuance would be ranked as Microsoft’s second largest acquisition, just behind $ 24 billion LinkedIn Corp. transaction in 2016, according to data collected by Bloomberg.
Microsoft and Nuance have it collaborated since 2019 on technologies to do things such as allow doctors to capture voice conversations from patient visits and enter data into electronic medical records.