• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 21, 2021

The European Commission granted Microsoft approval on Tuesday to close on its $16 billion acquisition of speech recognition and artificial intelligence software company Nuance Communications.

The European Commission in a statement said it approve the deal "unconditionally" after it found that the deal would not raise competition concerns in the European Economic Area.

“Based on its market investigation, the Commission found that the transaction, as notified, would not significantly reduce competition in the transcription software, cloud services, enterprise communication services, customer relationship management, productivity software and PC operating systems markets,” the statement read.

Nuance, per the statement, also can use the data only to provide its services. It is not used by any other company and cannot be used for any other purpose due to contractual restrictions and data protection legislation.

“Access to such data does not provide an advantage that would allow Microsoft to shut out competing healthcare software providers given that important transcribed information is typically stored in third-party applications like electronic health record systems that combine data from several sources, as opposed to Nuance's fragmented speech data,” the European Commission concluded.