When Microsoft announced its agreement to purchase all of the stock in Nuance Communications for $19.7B last week, all eyes were on healthcare. Kane Simms of VUX World explains the deal in great detail here. He highlights that Microsoft’s overall objective is to “dominate the AI provision and cloud infrastructure in the $10 TRILLION healthcare industry.” Within that eye-popping number, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes that Nuance’s ACI approach has a near-term opportunity to open a more modest “$500 billion TAM [total available market].”
Spending a mere $20 billion for the opportunity to be a category leader in a $500 billion marketplace seems like an easy choice for Microsoft, which has roughly $175 billion of cash on its balance sheet. Let’s rule out the idea that Microsoft is buying Nuance solely for its portfolio of patents and intellectual property in the speech processing and AI. Microsoft has enough of its own cognitive resources, especially LUIS and the Bot Framework. There is a lot of overlap in terms of tooling and core AI versus Nina and Mix.
There's also an 'academic version' for $250 Nuance K809A-F00-15.0 Dragon Professional Individual Academic Version 15 Speech Recognition Software. AND you can upgrade from Dragon 13 to 15 for $109: Dragon Professional Individual 15.0, Upgrade from Dragon Professional 12 or 13 or DPI 14.0 - but be careful! At this time, there are no reviews of. Advanced, accurate dictation: Unidirectional microphone, with noise cancellation ensures higher accuracy even in the noisiest environments Nuance PowerMic III Speech recognition, hand microphone, can be used with multiple programs such as Dragon Medical, Power Scribe, Dragon Legal and Professional Group and Individual.
In his three years as CEO of Nuance, Mark Benjamin has done a successful job of pruning away operations that were perceived as non-core. Automotive-oriented speech processing personnel, assets and customers were spun off into Cerence more than two years ago. It is now in the process of divesting its medical transcription and “EHR go-live” businesses to Assured Healthcare Partners and Aeries Technology Group. That leaves the Enterprise Group, with a focus on speech, natural language understanding and artificial intelligence to automate customer service, and the Healthcare Group which places emphasis on “clinical language understanding solutions that improve the clinical documentation process.” Note that the Enterprise Group also has formidable sets of products and services for conversational authentication and fraud prevention.
Ambient Clinical Intelligence: A Vertical Model for AI-Infused CX
It is surprising that the word “ambient” was not brought up in either Satya Nadella or Mark Benjamin’s webcast on the day of the deal. “Ambient Clinical Intelligence” (ACI) is the name that Nuance gives to the addition of “ambient sensing technology” to the the latest version of Nuance Dragon dictation software. It has been developing or trialing ACI for more than two years, with a focus on creating a better “patient-physician experience” by making it possible for a doctor to look up from the ever-present laptop that is used to populate electronic health records and make genuine eye contact with patients. Microsoft and Nuance now offer it as the Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) and it is core to defining an improved “patient-physician experience.” Nuance was one of the first companies to play up the idea of the purpose-driven capturing of spoken words in doctors’ offices to improve the quality of healthcare. Applying AI to the process of documenting discussions with patients or populating electronic health records frees doctors up to spend more quality time with patients.
Zooming out from the physician’s office, we expect the spirit of DAX permeating other verticals. Healthcare presents a slew of challenges that other verticals, like retailing, banking, insurance, government and all manner of services must tackle. There are high levels of sensitivity to the privacy of personal information which are often baked into laws, regulations or guidelines that call for equally high levels of security. Microsoft has formidable chops when it comes to security. Nuance’s long-standing investment in biometrics and AI-infused authentication will augment or complement its offerings. Both are areas where Microsoft’s strengths in OS, Applications, “The Cloud” opportunities”. Voice and behavioral biometrics is the sleeping giant because Microsoft’s infrastructure in businesses includes Active Directory, a resource that is the universal source of corporate identity.
Nuance brings some very formidable IP, tools and frameworks for biometrics-based and behavioral authentication. In concert with Microsoft Dynamics (for customer facing instances) and Active Directory (for employee authentication) expect to see an improved model for Seamless, yet strong, authentication is both in contact centers and for access to corporate VPNs.
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Earlier today, Microsoft announced its plans to purchase Nuance for $56 per share—23 percent above Nuance's closing price last Friday. The deal adds up to a $16 billion cash outlay and a total valuation for Nuance of about $19.7 billion, including that company's assumed debt.
Who is Nuance?
Nuance is a well-known player in the field of natural language recognition. The company's technology is the core of Apple's Siri personal assistant. Nuance also sells well-known personal speech-recognition software Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is invaluable to many people with a wide range of physical disabilities.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking, originally released in 1997, was one of the first commercially available continuous dictation products—meaning software that did not require the user to pause briefly between words. In 2000, Dragon Systems was acquired by ScanSoft, which acquired Nuance Communications in 2005 and rebranded itself as Nuance.
Earlier versions of Dragon software used hidden Markov models to puzzle out the meaning of human speech, but this method had serious limitations compared to modern AI algorithms. In 2009, Stanford researcher Fei-Fei Li created ImageNet—a massive training data set that spawned a boom in deep-learning algorithms used for modern, core AI tech.
AdvertisementAfter Microsoft researchers Dong Yu and Frank Seide successfully applied deep-learning techniques to real-time automatic speech recognition in 2010, Dragon—now Nuance—applied the same techniques to its own speech-recognition software.
Fast forward to today, and according to both Microsoft and Nuance, medically targeted versions of Dragon are in use by 77 percent of hospitals, 75 percent of radiologists, and 55 percent of physicians in the United States.
Microsoft’s acquisition play
Nuance Dictation System
Nuance Dictation Cloud
Microsoft and Nuance began a partnership in 2019 to deliver ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) technologies to health care providers. ACI technology is intended to reduce physician burnout and increase efficiency by offloading administrative tasks onto computers. (A 2017 study published in the Annals of Family Medicine documented physicians typically spending two hours of record-keeping for every single hour of actual patient care.)
Acquiring Nuance gives Microsoft direct access to the company's entire health care customer list. It also gives Microsoft the opportunity to push Nuance technology—currently, mostly used in the US—to Microsoft's own large international market. Nuance chief executive Mark Benjamin—who will continue to run Nuance as a Microsoft division after the acquisition—describes it as an opportunity to 'superscale how we change an industry.'
Nuance Dictation Service
The move doubles Microsoft's total addressable market in the health care vertical to nearly $500 billion. It also marries what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella describes as 'the AI layer at the healthcare point of delivery' with Microsoft's own massive cloud infrastructure, including Azure, Teams, and Dynamics 365.
Nuance Dictation Systems
The acquisition has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both Nuance and Microsoft and it is expected to close by the end of 2021.