NT: First, let’s start by hearing about Nuance, and what differentiates it from other speech companies. How do you position your company in leadership?

PR: First, Nuance is about helping companies improve the quality and effectiveness of their customer experiences. In short, that’s what we do. In a longer answer to your question about differentiation, we believe that what distinguishes us is as follows: First, we have the leading technology in providing speech solutions; second, our ability to integrate those technologies with applications and professional services to provide complete offerings to our clients, thereby helping them help their customers; and third, we have the longest history of experience in implementations in the industry. As you know, it’s a market that is sensitive to failure, so the credibility that comes with the range and depth of implementations that we have is very important to our customers and prospective customers.

NT: What are the greatest challenges that your company faces?

PR: Well, it’s a rapidly growing industry, it’s a rapidly growing business and it’s a business with a complex set of demands. We are having to manage that growth at the same time that we’re investing in technology that is evolving at a very rapid pace. And we’re having to do this on a worldwide scale because our customer demands are worldwide. So for us, the biggest challenge is the complexity of that multi-faceted operational agenda.<

NT: What do you feel is a practical solution to these challenges?

PR: One of the principles that we’ve used in the company is to focus everything we can on serving and improving the quality of our customer solutions. In a way, that helps us sort out the complexity of the business — from sales to marketing to services to technology. What we’re doing is improving the quality of the solutions we’re deploying with our customers. It’s surprising, but in doing that, you’re able to prioritize in a way that helps reduce the complexity of the growth.

NT: In terms of communicating the benefits of your technology to the various industries, have you considered “marketing through education”?

PR: That is an important facet of marketing. Our marketing team does spend a great deal of time not just on white papers, but on other forms of communication that help to evangelize and espouse our views regarding how the "The ability for enterprises to evoke their brand, extended through the self-service technology in the
call center, is what we’re enabling."technology and solutions we provide are enabling change within the call center business, and why speech is very effective. In fact, we believe that’s the single most important part of marketing.

NT: In your opinion, what is the greatest need of the speech technology industry?

PR: The most important thing in the speech technology industry is to continue focusing on applications and solutions. Speech has tended to be a technology-driven industry, and we believe that the technology now is compelling and enables a broad range of applications. I think you’re aware of the magnitude of enterprise deployments we have. For us, it’s primarily a focus on applications and solutions, and deploying those applications and solutions.

NT: Could you share with us some of the new developments at your company?

PR: Over the past 12 months, we’ve been increasingly focused, in response to what we hear from our customers and they from their customers, on improving the “naturalness” of the communication systems we’re deploying in enterprises. In particular, we’re focusing on more robust capabilities for what is known as “natural language understanding.” We’re also emphasizing robust capabilities for managing the interaction of a dialog, and the increased personalization of the system using voice technologies. The ability for enterprises to evoke their brand, extended through the self-service technology in the call center, is what we’re enabling.

NT: What is your vision of the future of the industry, for speech technology as well as the contact center?

PR: In order to think about the future of our technology, it’s worth stepping back for a moment and looking at what’s happening in the communications and IT worlds. We all appreciate that we’re seeing tremendous trends in the IT industry today toward information search, toward increased bandwidth of communications, and, very importantly, toward mobility. In a way, we’re seeking to take advantage of the use of speech to optimize those trends. We think that people want more direct access to information in a variety of ways, and speech is an excellent interface to allow them to do that. The mobility trend is also significantly raising the importance of speech because, of course, if you’re trying to seek information access via a mobile device, the relative advantage of speech over other modalities is increased.

NT: What is your company’s greatest core competency?

PR: We know a lot about how speech enables our clients to be more effective in serving their customers. I think what underlies that competency is a combination of our technology, our sales experience in speech, and our services and ability to deploy and deliver solutions.

NT: Do you find differences in vertical markets in the way they use speech, such as financial services or insurance or healthcare?

PR: Well, there are very distinct applications in almost every industry. There are some things that are common, but there is a lot of distinction in every industry, because the information access problems in each industry are quite unique.

NT: What would you say is your positioning statement?

PR: Nuance is about using speech solutions to help our clients improve the quality of their customer experience from beginning to end.

NT: How do you differentiate Nuance from your competition?<

PR: We are a pioneer in speech technology and a leader in speech deployments. We offer our partners the broadest array of solutions and languages, and we have the leading capabilities in the emerging areas of mobility and embedded solutions.

NT: Thank you for your valuable time.