back to article UK competition watchdog closes the comment book on Microsoft's Nuance merger

If you wanted to speak your brains have your say on Microsoft's acquisition of Nuance, the moment has passed. In the UK at any rate. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced an inquiry into the merger. The current statutory deadline for a decision following Phase 1 is 9 March, at which point the CMA might go …

  1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    Not just Windows

    Nuance also provides voice recognition software for Samsung's Android phones. The merge means one fewer independent providers leaving us essentially with Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. Given that all of them operate some form of vertical integration (device + software), that's hardly a healthy market.

    1. Roland6 Silver badge

      Re: Not just Windows

      >The merge means one fewer independent providers

      I think you'll find that several on your list are actually customers of Nuance...

      The problem is that Nuance dominates the voice recognition and semantic analysis sector and so you pretty much have to either use Nuance/Nuance partner tech or licence Nuance IP...

  2. spold Silver badge

    The free version...

    ...just recognises "Owwww", "I don't like the look of that", "That's a small one", "He's dead Jim", and "where did I leave the scissors".

  3. dharmOS

    Actually a medical land grab

    The aim here is not to own the consumer market but to grab the clinical (and possibly legal) dictation market. These have corporations/hospitals who will fund the monthly cloud subscriptions and potentially saves the cost of medical transcription secretary (woefully underpaid in the NHS ~£20K for the work they do).

    Dragon’s products for medical dictation is fantastic from experience and every big IT player is trying to grab a chunk of healthcare (e.g. Oracle and Cerner, IBM’s Watson etc). It may also to buy into the raw voice data used to train the AI to lock others out of the market.

  4. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "Microsoft's acquisition of Nuance"

    So, Nuance bought Dragon, the best speech-recognition software I know of. Now Borkzilla had bought Nuance.

    Well then, goodbye Dragon, it was nice knowing you.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Microsoft's acquisition of Nuance"

      >Well then, goodbye Dragon, it was nice knowing you.

      It will be interesting to see what happens to Siri... (Nuance tech in there...)

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