Microsoft Corp. is engaged in advanced discussions to acquire Nuance Communications Inc. artificial information and speech Technology Company at $16 billion, according to sources. The value of Nuance at about $56 per share could be debated, the source says, adding that a deal could be announced.

After the $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016, the merger with Nuance is second largest deal for Microsoft.

Bloomberg News, which announced the Nuance-Microsoft agreement first, said negotiations are continuing and talks may still collapse.

Burlington, a company headquartered in Massachusetts, Nuance whose voice recognition technological technology has helped to launch Apple Inc's Siri assistant.

This year's shares in Nuance rose 3.4 percent to almost $13 trillion, but still trailing a leap of 9.9 percehnt in the S&P 500 Index, offering the firm, which set the foundations for the technology used by Siri's voice app. It has been up 15 percent for Microsoft.

For its fiscal year ending on September, after losing $217 million in the preceding year, NUANCE, whose products include speech-recognition software Dragon, had net revenues of $91 million for its $1, 48 billion.

Microsoft is also active on the deals front with a market cap of $1.93 trillion.

Nuance and Microsoft started to work together on medical apps during doctors visits in 2019, such as automatic recording. In the first quarter of earnings season Microsoft and Nuance Communications according to Wedbush Securities Analyst Dan Ives are two of the top three technology buys. Ives highlighted that Nuance has generated an increasing revenue stream with the ‘hospital-wide deployments’ of its technology. Over the offer stated by Microsoft, Wedbush set the $65 price point.

In research projects, Microsoft entered the field of artificial intelligence decades ago and co-founder Bill Gates early focused on how to facilitate people's computing with plain English. In recent years, the company has employed several thousand staff to create apps for understanding and translating speech, recognizing images and detecting abnormalities. AI is seen by the corporation as a leading driver of potential cloud revenues.