The European Union’s competition regulator has given the all-clear to Microsoft’s $19.7 billion purchase of transcription tech firm Nuance, which was announced earlier this year.
The EU said today it has concluded there are no competition concerns for the region if the acquisition goes ahead, clearing it without conditions.
The deal was notified to the Commission’s regulators on November 16.
While Microsoft-Nuance has gotten a green light from the bloc, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority has just opened its own preliminary investigation — so some regional scrutiny continues.
On the EU side, the Commission’s investigation looked at horizontal overlaps between Nuance and Microsoft in the markets for transcription software — finding the two provide very different products (out-of-the-box software for end-users versus APIs targeted at devs wanting to add speech recognition tech to their apps, respectively).
It also determined that the combined entity will continue to face “strong” compe …
