In December 2021, it was reported that the deal would be approved by the European Union. Shortly after the deal, the Competition and Markets Authority, a UK regulatory body, stated it was looking into the deal on the basis of antitrust concerns. This will be Microsoft's second-biggest deal ever, after its purchase of LinkedIn for $24 billion in 2016. Nuance's CEO, Mark Benjamin, will stay with the company. On April 12, 2021, Microsoft announced that it will buy Nuance Communications for $19.7 billion, or $56 a share, a 22% increase over the previous closing price. In 2013, Nuance confirmed that its natural language processing algorithms supported Apple's Siri voice assistant. Lernout & Hauspie had acquired speech recognition company Dragon Systems in June 2001, shortly before becoming bankrupt in October.

Beginning with the December 2001 acquisition of Lernout & Hauspie assets, the company moved into the speech recognition business and began to compete with Nuance. Prior to 2001, ScanSoft focused primarily on desktop imaging software such as TextBridge, PaperPort and OmniPage. Two months later, in March, Visioneer acquired ScanSoft from Xerox to form a new public company with ScanSoft as the new company-wide name. Visioneer eventually sold its hardware division to Primax Electronics, Ltd. was founded to develop scanner hardware and software products, such as a sheetfed scanner called PaperMax and the document management software PaperPort. In March 1992, a new company called Visioneer, Inc. The company became known as Xerox Imaging Systems (XIS), and later ScanSoft. In 1980, Kurzweil sold his company to Xerox. to develop the first omni-font optical character-recognition system – a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font.

In 1974, Raymond Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. During the prior decade, the two companies competed in the commercial large-scale speech application business. The resulting company adopted the Nuance name. acquired and merged with Nuance Communications, a natural language spinoff from SRI International. (SSFT), and the combined company became known as ScanSoft. In 1999, Visioneer acquired ScanSoft, Inc. The company that would become Nuance was incorporated in 1992 as Visioneer. 1.1.1 Partnership with Siri and Apple Inc.

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