Nuance Introduces Nina, the Virtual Assistant for Mobile Customer Service Apps

Press release:

Nina is the First Virtual Assistant to Understand What is Said – And Who is Saying It;
First to Provide an Open SDK for Mobile App Developers

Burlington, MA – August 6, 2012 – Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today introduced Nina, the virtual assistant for mobile customer service apps. With Nina, companies can quickly add speech-based virtual assistant capabilities to their existing iOS and Android mobile apps, greatly enhancing the self-service experience for their customers. Nina combines Nuance speech recognition, Text-to-Speech (TTS), voice biometrics, and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology hosted in the cloud to deliver an interactive user experience that not only understands what is said, but also can identify who is saying it.

Nuance also announced that USAA, a leading financial services provider that serves members of the U.S. military, veterans and their families, has adopted the virtual assistant for use within its popular 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. “We believe that the virtual assistant has tremendous potential to make it simpler, faster and more satisfying for our members to manage their financial affairs on their mobile devices.”

Nina is significant because it is the first virtual assistant customer service app to incorporate both speech recognition and voice biometrics into a single integrated solution. Nina is also the first solution that provides an open software development kit (SDK) to support the rapid integration of virtual assistant capabilities into existing mobile applications. In addition, Nina is the first to allow organizations to brand their own virtual assistant persona, including the visual appearance and implementation of optional custom TTS voices.

“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. “Nina provides our customers a major competitive differentiator by enabling more successful self-service through their mobile apps. We are especially pleased to further our partnership with USAA, a company known for its innovation and approach to delivering a premier mobile customer service experience to its members.”

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 available source code to quickly create a custom persona, including changing visual persona elements such as being awake, asleep, listening, processing, or answering a request. Nina also includes a range of 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 rapid integration of virtual assistant capabilities into mobile apps for Apple iOS and Android, the Nina Virtual Assistant SDK has three components:
• Nina Core APIs – Binary APIs that provide access to the core cloud services, such as speech recognition, text to speech and NLU. This provides the most control and customization possible to the mobile app developer.
• Nina Virtual Assistant APIs – Source APIs that provide mobile app developers with access to customize the persona, as well as providing control of all modes of input, including speech recognition, text to speech and touch dialogs.
• Nina Reference Designs – Source code of Nina Virtual Assistant apps and functions, including the Nina Banking Assistant, deliver pre-designed templates and tasks for store location, bill pay, account information and over 200 other banking related queries. Developers will be able to leverage the reference designs to rapidly develop their own virtual assistant capabilities for travel, insurance, retail, government and more.
• Nina Virtual Assistant Cloud: The power and intelligence of Nina, including Nuance’s industry-leading speech recognition, TTS, NLU, interactive dialog management and voice biometrics services, is delivered through Nuance’s hosted platform, Nuance On Demand.

Availability

The Nina Virtual Assistant SDK and cloud service is available now from Nuance in US, UK and Australian English, with additional languages to be made available later this year. Nuance provides professional services in support of Nina and virtual assistant implementations.

For more information about Nina: http://www.nuance.com/meet-nina.

About Nuance Communications

Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) is a leading provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with devices and systems. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.

The Real Way to Build a Network

The February 6, 2012 issue of FORTUNE magazine contains an article with the above title.  The article is an excerpt of a book by Reid Hoffman (partner at Greylock and founder and executive chairman at LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha (award-winning entrepreneur and author).  Just the first five paragraphs, which appear below, contain considerable wisdom.  Hoffman's and Casnocha's book is entitled, "The Start-Up of You."

Many people are turned off by the topic of networking.  They think it’s slimy, inauthentic.  Picture the consummate networker: a high-energy fast talker who collects as many business cards as he can and attends mixers sporting slicked-back hair.  Or the overambitious college kid who frantically e-mails alumni, schmoozes with the board of trustees, and adds anyone he’s ever met as an online friend.  Such people are drunk on networking Kool-Aid – and are looking at a potentially nasty hangover.

Luckily, building your network doesn’t have to be like that.  Old-school networkers are transactional.  They pursue relationships thinking solely about what other people can do for them.  Relationship builders, on the other hand, try to help others first.  They don’t keep score.  And they prioritize high-quality relationships over a large number of connections.

Building a genuine relationship with another person depends on at least two abilities.  The first is seeing the world from another person’s perspective.  No one knows that better than the skilled entrepreneur.  Entrepreneurs succeed when they make stuff people will pay money for – and that means understanding what’s going on in the heads of customers.  Likewise, in relationships it’s only when you put yourself in the other person’s shoes that you begin to develop an honest connection.

The second ability is being able to think about how you can collaborate with and help the other person rather than thinking about what you can get.  We’re not suggesting that you be so saintly that a self-interested thought never crosses your mind.  What we’re saying is that your first move should always be to help.  A study on negotiation found that a key difference between skilled and average negotiators was the time spent searching for shared interests and asking questions of the other person.

Follow that model.  Start with a friendly gesture and genuinely mean it.  Dale Carnegie’s classic book on relationships, despite all its wisdom, has the unfortunate title How to Win Friends and Influence People.  This makes Carnegie widely misunderstood.  You don’t “win” a friend.  A friend is not an asset you own; a friend is an ally, a collaborator.  When you can tell that someone is attempting sincerity, it leaves you cold.  It is like the feeling you have when someone calls you by your first name repeatedly in conversation.  Novelist Jonathan Franzen gets it right when he says inauthentic people are obsessed with authenticity.