Microsoft Corporation is in progressive talks to purchase artificial intelligence and speech technology company Nuance Communications, at about $16 billion.

A deal between both companies could be announced as soon as this week, citing people familiar with the matter. The price being conferred could value Nuance at about $56 a share, though the terms could still change.

Talks between Burlington, Massachusetts-based Nuance and the Seattle-based Microsoft are ongoing and the discussions could still fall apart, the report added.

Nuance is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, on the fringes of Boston, that offers speech recognition, and artificial intelligence. Nuance fused with its entrant in the commercial large-scale speech application business, ScanSoft, in October 2005. ScanSoft was a Xerox spin-off that was bought in 1999 by Visioneer, hardware, and software scanner company, which adopted ScanSoft as the new merged company name. The original ScanSoft had its roots in Kurzweil Computer Products.