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.
Nuance PowerMic III Handheld USB Dictation Microphone with Cradle and 9 Foot Cord for Dragon Professional Group and Dragon Legal Group Only (1-10) 4.3 out of 5 stars 26 $270.27 $ 270. To enable the Dictation Box for all unsupported applications: From the DragonBar, select ToolsOptions. The Options dialog box opens. Click the Miscellaneous tab. Dragon Medical One requires a PC with Windows™ 7 or greater. A Mac with VMware, Parallels, Bootcamp, or similar running Windows 7 or greater is also supported. If you are not a Windows user or aren't sure if this will work for you, please contact us for a free technical evaluation and trial.
Dragon Medical One is a lightweight versatile cloud-based speech-recognition solution that allows busy clinicians, using a Windows-based device, to access the speed and flexibility of powerful voice recognition software. This smartphone app, available for download on iOS and Android, lets clinicians use their own smartphone as a dictation microphone.
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
Dragon Dictation System
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.)
Intel driver. 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 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.
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.
Why Choose Dragon Medical One?
DMO is cloud based. Your unique user profile is stored in the cloud. Access your profile and dictate on multiple devices with ease.
Since the actual processing occurs in the cloud there is minimal demand on your computer.
DMO can be installed on an unlimited number of PCs. (Dragon’s engine is operating in the cloud, however, the application has to be downloaded onto the computer so that it can type and control text. This application will only work in a windows environment. Please chat to us below if you are using a Mac.)
DMO is excellent at understanding accents, resulting in exceptional initial accuracy for all users.
DMO comes with the free PowerMic Mobile App, which allows users to sync their cell phone directly with the computer allowing them to use their phone as a mobile microphone with no limit on range.
Do you remote into your clinic computer? DMO with the PowerMic Mobile is perfect! The mic talks to the software through the internet, so as you dictate into your phone at home, you see the words typing to the computer at your clinic!
Using Dragon One Dictation With Ecw
One Year Subscriptions Available for $109/month ($578 one-time implementation fee)