Nuance, Microsoft’s latest acquisition, has over 700 employees in India

More than a tenth of the 7,100 employees of Nuance Communications Inc.—the US-based AI firm that Microsoft Corp. acquired for $19.7 billion on Monday—work out of its India offices in Pune and Bengaluru.

These centres provide transcription and editing services, besides research and development (R&D) work on the Artificial Intelligence platform.

Nuance, a conversational AI and cloud-based clinical intelligence firm, has more than 1,600 people globally for transcription and editing. A third of them are based in India. In addition, it has a few hundred people in its R&D unit working on machine learning algorithms to improve speech-to-text tools.

The Burlington, Massachusetts-based company is among the pioneers in voice recognition tools and builds products for converting speech into text. The company has launched a transcription engine in Hindi and Indian English targeted at customers in the country.