1/ Microsoft is acquiring Nuance for $19.7 billion. That's Microsoft's second largest acquisition, behind LinkedIn ($26.2b)

But what is Nuance?

Nuance’s story has everything: Ray Kurzweil, Siri, and a complex corporate history.

2/ Nuance Communications started developing scanner hardware and software under the name Visoneer in 1992. Eventually, it would acquire a division of Xerox called ScanSoft in 1999 and publicly list itself as ScanSoft.

This is the Visoneer PaperMax.

3/ Xerox’s ScanSoft could trace its history to Ray Kurzewil, the futurist and inventor. Xerox had bought Kurzewil’s company that developed optical character recognition (OCR) software in 1974 and rebranded it as ScanSoft.

Kurzweil is longtime Google employee.

4/ The merged ScanSoft now took an aggressive M&A growth strategy, buying up companies in the scanner space. But in 2001, it ventured into speech recognition acquiring Dragon Systems, which was the state-of-the-art in its field.

5/ In 2005, ScanSoft acquired Nuance Communications and renamed itself to Nuance. The new company continued to aggressively acquire companies, now mostly in the speech recognition space.

6/ Starting in 2008 Nuance entered the healthcare space with the acquisition of eScription, an on-demand medical transcription service. It would go on to dominate the medical transcription business through more acquisitions.

7/ In 2010, a small startup called Siri used Nuance as the backend for its speech recognition. Siri would be acquired by Apple a year later and deployed to hundreds of millions of iPhones.

8/ In 2014, Nuance acquired Accelarad, the makers of SeeMyRadiology, a cloud service that processes medical images. Computer vision has made serious progress in radiology.

9/ The advances in machine learning and enormous amounts of data have obviously helped Nuance over the last decade. However, the last year has made it clear that healthcare and telehealth will be enormous markets for tech.

10/ Nuance has over 10,000 healthcare customers, some of them very large. Combined with the right approach of using AI and cloud services to serve customers, While other tech companies are under antitrust scrutiny, MSFT has used the opportunity to go on an acquisition spree.