• IVR Service Provider
• Articles

Nuance Brings Conversation to Life with Nina and Dragon Voicemail to Text

By Amanda Ciccatelli, TMCnet Web Editor

Speech recognition technology has made rapid progress lately as it has become a popular feature of smartphones, automotive navigation, entertainment systems, and more. 

Nuance Communications, Inc., provider of interactive voice response (IVR), has introduced Nina, the virtual assistant for mobile customer service apps. With Nina, companies can add speech-based virtual assistant capabilities to iOS and Android mobile apps, enhancing the self-service experience for customers.

Nina combines Nuance speech recognition, Text-to-Speech (TTS), voice biometrics, and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology hosted in the cloud for an interactive user experience that understands what is said and identifies who is saying it.

As a provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers around the world, Nuance’s technologies make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with devices and systems.

“Nina is a mobile virtual center for the enterprise to understand who they are and what they are seeing. Nina is not limited by vertical, so we support all verticals in technology,” Robert Gary, vice president and general manager, mobile care, Nuance, told TMCnet in an exclusive interview at SpeechTEK (News - Alert) last week in New York City.

USAA, a financial services provider that serves members of the U.S. military, veterans and their families, has adopted the Nina for use within its mobile app. A pilot is planned for August and the functionality will launch to all USAA members early next year.

“USAA’s innovative solutions are designed to make life easier for our highly mobile military service members, and increasingly for all members who now expect to get things done when, where and how they want.” said Neff Hudson, assistant vice president of emerging channels for USAA, in a statement. “The virtual assistant has tremendous potential to make it simpler, faster and more satisfying for our members to manage financial affairs on their mobile devices.”

Nina is the first virtual assistant customer service app to with speech recognition and voice biometrics in one integrated solution. Also, Nina is the first solution that provides an open software development kit (SDK) to support the integration of virtual assistant capabilities into mobile applications.

“Nina is a watershed innovation for the automated customer service industry, not only because it brings the virtual assistant directly into an app, but because it raises the bar through its level of interactive dialog and language understanding,” said Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager of the Nuance Enterprise Division.

“The point is you can be anywhere in the app and get to where you want to go,” said Gary. “The idea is the customer can go back at any time and use the app as intended.”

The Nina Virtual Assistant for customer service is comprised of:

• Nina Virtual Assistant Persona: Nina is a pre-made virtual assistant persona, which developers can leverage for their app, or use the source code to create a custom persona, including changing visual persona elements like being awake, asleep, listening, processing, or answering a request. Nina includes existing Nuance text-to-speech voices, and Nuance can develop a custom TTS voice for an optional development fee.
• Nina Virtual Assistant SDK: To enable the integration of virtual assistant capabilities into mobile apps for Apple (News - Alert) iOS and Android, the Nina Virtual Assistant SDK has three components including Nina Core APIs, Nina Virtual Assistant APIs and Nina Reference Designs.
• Nina Virtual Assistant Cloud: The power of Nina, including Nuance’s speech recognition, TTS, NLU, interactive dialog management and voice biometrics services, is delivered through Nuance’s hosted platform, Nuance On Demand.

The Nina Virtual Assistant SDK and cloud service is available now from Nuance in US, UK and Australian English, with additional languages available later this year.

Additionally this month, Siemens Enterprise Communications (News - Alert) has integrated Nuance’s Dragon Voicemail to Text into its OpenScape Xpressions Unified Messaging solution. Siemens (News - Alert) Enterprise Communications customers are now able to receive transcriptions of voicemail messages delivered to their email inboxes.

With the OpenScape Xpressions voicemail to text feature, enterprises can keep workforces connected from anywhere. Voicemail is transcribed using Nuance’s enterprise-optimized Dragon voicemail to text technology, and delivered to email where it can be read from PCs and remotely.

 “Dragon Voicemail to Text is easy to use and intuitive, and gives providers like Siemens Enterprise Communications another world-class solution as part of their portfolio of unified communications and messaging solutions,” said John Pollard, vice president and general manager, voice to text services, Nuance Mobile. “Powered by Dragon, message transcriptions are fast, accurate and get delivered to email anytime, anywhere.”

The voicemail to text capability of OpenScape Xpressions is available for enterprise deployment, supporting the English and German languages, with plans for additional language support this year.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.