The European Commission's competition department approved Microsoft's € 19.7 billion deal to acquire Nuance Communications.
In a statement, the committee said it had "unconditionally approved" the acquisition, which it said "would not raise any competition concerns in the European Economic Area ('EEA')."
The watchdog had previously said it would make a decision before December 21.
Microsoft Nuance
"Based on its market investigation, the Commission found that the transaction, as notified, would not significantly reduce competition in the markets for transcription software, cloud services, corporate communication services, customer relationship management, clients, productivity software, and PC operating systems. added the statement. .
The watchdog feared the deal would make Microsoft favor Nuance over other competing services.
It had distributed a questionnaire to Microsoft's customers and competitors asking them to list the various concerns they might have with the deal, which was first announced in April 2021.
The organization also wanted to know if the two companies were competitors or if the agreement would affect customers and competitors.
Nuance's flagship product is its Dragon speech recognition software platform, which uses deep learning models to improve the accuracy of speech transcriptions.
But the company has other software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, built primarily for the healthcare industry. One of the most important use cases is for doctors and call center agents to automate note taking. The company claims to serve more than three-quarters (77%) of US hospitals.
In announcing the deal, Microsoft said it wanted to leverage Nuance's AI expertise for interactive voice response (IVR), virtual assistants, and digital biometric solutions. Apple's digital assistant Siri was one of the most popular Nuance licensees at the time.