Microsoft's AI program Cortana competes with Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa but has been much less successful. Of course, our team at Northwest Ergonomics and Assistive Technology have been installing Dragon software for many years to help disabled and injured people continue pursuing their professional and creative goals. The same types of communications solutions will figure prominently into the operations of other types of businesses, and governments. Microsoft has been collaborating with Nuance for some time to provide this searchable transcription solution, and the project gained momentum last year due to the increased remote communications caused by the the COVID-19 pandemic.

Enter Nuance/Dragon which is very intuitive and accurate in its dictations. There is an increasing amount of recording going on in the healthcare space, but finding use of the recordings is difficult without indexable transcriptions.

Microsoft has prioritized healthcare/medical solutions and recently collaborated with Nuance to take advantage of Nuance's sophisticated AI to transcribe and dictate online conversations that medical providers were creating. Nuance of course is primarily known for its flagship dictation program Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Microsoft and Nuance (makers of Dragon dictation software) have announced that Microsoft will acquire Nuance for $19.7 billion, Microsoft's second-largest acquisition ever.

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