A few months after the announcement of the acquisition of Nuance Communications by Microsoft, Brussels gave the green light to continue the operation. On Tuesday, the European Commission unconditionally authorized this acquisition project.
The Commission indicates in a press release that it has concluded that the transaction would pose “no competition problem within the European Economic Area”.
By acquiring this artificial intelligence and voice technology company, Microsoft hopes to strengthen itself in the healthcare sector where Nuance is mainly present.
No brake on competition
Nuance’s technology uses speech recognition, AI and natural language processing to streamline healthcare processes. For its part, Microsoft recently launched Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, which will be significantly developed with Nuance in the fold. The two companies were also already associated since 2019 to automate administrative tasks.
After an extensive investigation into the horizontal overlaps and links between the activities of the two companies, the European Commission concluded that the transaction would “not significantly reduce competition in the markets for transcription software, cloud services, business communication services, customer relationship management, productivity software and PC operating systems ”.
On the use of data transcribed with Nuance’s software, the Commission concluded that Nuance could only use this data “to provide its services”. In other words, “access to this data does not confer an advantage that would allow Microsoft to oust competing healthcare software vendors, as important transcribed information is typically stored in third-party applications such as records systems. computerized health systems that combine data from multiple sources, as opposed to fragmented voice data from Nuance, ”explains the Commission.