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Microsoft acquires Nuance—makers of Dragon speech rec—for $16 billion:
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.
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.
[...] 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."
[...] 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.
(Score: 4, Touché) by FatPhil on Tuesday April 13 2021, @11:04AM (4 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday April 13 2021, @01:03PM (1 child)
Were? Some of us are still using WM10 / lumias as daily driver and dreading the hardware death and forced migration to one of the ugly-sisters or mobile OS.
I do miss WP8.1 though - much better in many ways.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday April 13 2021, @02:01PM
I will confess to playing with whatever MS OS was on the earlier Lumias for a day, and compared to all of the iPhone/Android/Meego/Sailfish buttonless swipey interfaces it was easily the least bad. I'd almost say I liked it. I averaged about 1 "why did it do that?" or "why is it forcing me to do this the least efficient way possible" per hour, rather than about 1 per minute in some of the others. I still have a couple of N9s (so-called Meego, which was actually marketting bullshit), and a Jolla, and I literally never use them, unless I need the GPS/maps. (So only on holiday, which is never, thanks Wuhan!)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by drussell on Tuesday April 13 2021, @03:16PM (1 child)
I'm still using Nokia 5300 phones... I've got three of them.
I think I'm currently on my last good, working, original unit but with the parts from the other two (like on one, I just cracked the screen somehow) to make at least one more good one again, I'm sure. I just bought a couple more brand new batteries for about $5, so I should be good for at least another few years. :)
I love these things... Tiny, yet robust so it is easy to carry in a pocket and lasts a week on a single battery charge... Better radio in it than most "modern" phones, so reception is fine where others don't even have signal, etc.
What's not to like?!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday April 13 2021, @03:33PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves