It also gives Microsoft the opportunity to push Nuance technology-currently, mostly used in the US-to Microsoft's own large international market.

(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.)Īcquiring Nuance gives Microsoft direct access to the company's entire health care customer list. ACI technology is intended to reduce physician burnout and increase efficiency by offloading administrative tasks onto computers. Microsoft and Nuance began a partnership in 2019 to deliver ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) technologies to health care providers. AdvertisementĪfter 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.įast 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. 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. In 2000, Dragon Systems was acquired by ScanSoft, which acquired Nuance Communications in 2005 and rebranded itself as Nuance.Įarlier 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. Nuance also sells well-known personal speech-recognition software Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is invaluable to many people with a wide range of physical disabilities.ĭragon 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. The company's technology is the core of Apple's Siri personal assistant. Nuance is a well-known player in the field of natural language recognition.

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