The European Commission has approved Microsoft's acquisition of Nuance Communications, the company whose speech recognition technology was used in Apple's Siri voice assistant. The acquisition cost is $16 billion, Reuters reported.
Based on its market investigation, the European Commission concluded that the deal would not limit competition on the markets within the European Economic Area. In particular, it would not have an impact on the markets of cloud services, transcription software, PC operating systems, enterprise communication services, etc.
Earlier, the deal was approved by the regulators of Australia and the United States.
Microsoft announced its intention to acquire Nuance in April this year. Later it was reported that the European Commission had initiated an intensive investigation into the impact of the acquisition on Microsoft's competitors and Nuance's customers. The investigation has now been completed, and the acquisition may proceed as planned.
Kay Lee
The deal is Microsoft's second-biggest one since its 2016 acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. Reuters notes that tech companies acquire more and more developers of AI products to integrate their solutions into their products and services.
