US tech giant Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy Artificial Intelligence (AI) and speech technology firm Nuance Communications for $16 billion (roughly around Rs 1.19 lakh crore).
According to a report by Bloomberg, the deal between Nuance and Microsoft talks are ongoing and the discussions could still fall apart.
Nuance is a US-based voice recognition technology, which helped launch Apple’s assistant Siri. The company also makes software for several sectors – ranging from automotive to healthcare industries.
This will be the second-biggest deal of Microsoft, after the tech giant acquired LinkedIn 2016 for Rs 1.96 lakh crores.
Buying Nuance could expand Microsoft’s capabilities in speech-to-text software. This technology can be incorporated into its own products such as the Teams communication app and Bing search engine.
Earlier this week, Microsoft-owned social network LinkedIn reportedly became the latest victim of a massive data breach when data of 500 million user profiles were allegedly leaked by cybercriminals.
Denying the data breach, LinkedIn spokesperson said, “We have investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies.”
“It does include publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn. This was not a LinkedIn data breach, and no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what we’ve been able to review”, said the company in a statement.
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