For the past 20 years, Nuance Communications, the voice recognition pioneer that was once Dragon Systems and ScanSoft, has been building deep domain expertise across verticals such as healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, or retail. Now focusing on conversational AI, and building AI‑powered solutions that amplify human intelligence, Nuance is a very different company from its early days when it powered virtually every single voice-to-text and voice engine effort - from Apple's Siri to all the many voice-command solutions that were tried, tested and later abandoned by car manufacturers, as well as TV and many consumer electronics manufacturers.
While the company still holds important IP in the voice recognition space - which in itself makes an attractive proposition and was the reason why it was previously the target of multiple acquisition efforts by all the tech giants - Nuance has been transitioning its technology to more scalable models through the acquisition of smaller companies specializing in artificial intelligence and machine learning voice libraries and specialized engines.
"Just about three years ago, we, at Nuance, saw that a new digital revolution was coming — one that would forever change the ways in which people work, live, and receive care. More than that, we saw our opportunity to help lead that change by building the world’s most advanced conversational AI solutions that deliver real and meaningful outcomes for those we serve. It is an audacious goal, for sure, but it is from which our shared Purpose and Value set was borne, and one that has set us on an incredible growth path as we strategically reoriented our company to focus on creating state-of-the-art solutions that support our global customer base across the healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, travel, retail, and government industries," says Mark Benjamin, the CEO of Nuance Communications, explaining the company's mindset.
Most of Nuance's executives today don't even have a clear memory of all the company's pioneering efforts and trajectory, having inherited already a totally transformed business, resulting from multiple acquisitions and shareholder changes. Explaining the vision for Nuance, Mark Benjamin highlights the company's strengths in health and biometrics, real-time intelligence for call-centers, and automatic voice transcription that powers its conversational AI cloud-based bots.
"In order to continue accelerating our mission and further fuel our innovation, we announced today that we are combining our operations and capabilities with Microsoft and have entered into an agreement to be acquired. Over the last 18 months, we have been partnering to jointly develop and deploy our DAX (Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience) solution and, more recently, have been working together to deepen our shared footprint in our vertical markets, notably the financial services, telecommunications, travel, retail, and government industries. Our growing partnership has made it very clear to both Nuance and Microsoft that we truly share the same passion, vision, and values for creating technology that positively changes how people work," Benjamin adds.
Nuance and Microsoft expect to accelerate R&D efforts in conversational AI solutions and cloud platforms, particularly focusing on healthcare (telehealth), and business solutions with virtual assistants, digital messaging, and biometric solutions.
www.nuance.com
www.microsoft.com
