To kick us off this week, I want to highlight a comment from last week's show:
'the content was great and I like your hoodie'. Yeah. Yeah.
The content was of course great. But that hoodie, it is indeed great.
Like really great. Now also in other news,
I don't have a hoodie like Gwyn's. Anyway,
Microsoft announced that they have bought AI juggernaut Nuance for the small sum
of 19.7 billion with a B. Mmm.
So why has Microsoft made the second largest acquisition ever with
Nuance?
I am Lars Klint and find out why in this week's episode of Azure This Week.
By now,
you might be asking who is Nuance and why are they worth almost
$20 billion? Well, I did.
The first we heard of Nuance in an Azure context was with the announcement of
the healthcare cloud on Azure, back in 2020.
Nuance AI technology is used in the industry specific healthcare cloud to
leverage the expertise that Nuance has with electronic health records and system
providers.
Nuance provides conversational AI and cloud-based clinical intelligence for
healthcare providers and is best known for their Dragon software and
just like Dragons,
the Dragon suite has been around for a long time and provide one of the best
language recognition services that you can get.
I used the Dragon products about eight years ago in a project,
and it was brilliant back then as well.
But Microsoft hasn't bought Nuance because of their healthcare links though.
$19.6 billion is a lot of cash. It's, uh,
it's about that, that much, that, that much.
Now while I just mentioned healthcare a bunch of times,
and Microsoft themselves mentions healthcare, you know,
numerous times in relation to the acquisition.
I actually don't think that is the full story, nor even the real reason.
Sure, in the short term,
Microsoft and Azure will benefit from the healthcare business components and
collect that revenue. I mean, that's just a bonus though.
What Microsoft is really interested in is the AI component.
In particular, the natural language understanding.
I'd argue that that is the real reason for the purchase of Nuance.
Just think about it. We're already talking to Google or Alexa or apps, you know,
for dictation and much more.
If Microsoft can integrate natural language into all their products like search,
and offers, and cloud computing,
we'll start to think differently about computing in general.
And that is why Nuance is worth almost $20 billion to
Microsoft. What does all this mean for the AI future then?
Let me illustrate. Instead of employing a voice assistant for simple,
straightforward searches, Microsoft's Office products, such as Word and Excel,
will respond to user voice commands in more complex searches.
Instead of asking to call Satya in a user's contact list,
the software will process and understand chained queries such as 'call the
main man' and get the right context when you ask it to add a calendar entry or
organize reservations. Context is key.
As humans we understand context implicitly, such as, you know,
asking for the best restaurant and then following up with, Oh,
can you show me how to get there? We know what that means.
And that is only the beginning.
As opposed to the largely failed Cortana strategy for 2015,
this time AI is a company-wide approach,
employing some 5,000 people inside Microsoft.
Expect to see out a lot more AI integrations from both inside Microsoft and
from developers leveraging the Azure cloud AI offering as well.
On April 1st,
ACG announced a new meteorology course where you could learn all the
clouds. Yeah, Nimbus, Cirrus, and even air bending. Now,
while we might've been kidding, Azure, didn't seem to have got that memo.
This week the weather services on Azure Maps went into GA.
Using the Accuweather data,
developers can now get weather data such as current conditions, forecasts,
weather alerts, and more through the Azure maps API,
just perfect for creating the meteorology app you never knew you needed.
Now this is a very cool addition for developers that want to use weather data in
apps and services in the cloud. Check it out, using the link in the description.
So what's your take on Nuance, AI and Azure?
Do you have a different theory for how Microsoft is going to use AI?
Let me know in the comments,
consider pressing the subscribe button for more cloud opinions, cloud tutorials,
cloud content, cloud everything.
And give me a thumbs up if I should also wear an amazing hoodie on the next
episode of the show. Go on, help me out, please.
As we say on the A Cloud Guru team,
when one team member has a fantastic company sponsored outfit and the
other team member does not, seek and you shall cloud.
We'll see you next week and keep giving a thumbs up Cloud Gurus.