Nuance Expands Artificial Intelligence Innovations to Power New Generation of Virtual Assistants

BURLINGTON, Mass., June 01, 2017 -- Leveraging decades of experience delivering customer care solutions globally for a wide range of industries, Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:NUAN) today unveiled a series of advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) innovations across its Digital Engagement Platform.

To address rising consumer expectations for seamless and effortless service amidst an evolving landscape of digital and mobile channels, Nuance’s AI innovations are powering a new generation of customer engagement apps that enable enterprises to communicate with consumers anytime, anywhere, and through virtually any channel. In a single platform, Nuance is the only vendor to combine the tooling, intelligence and analytics of natural language processing (NLP) and cognitive technologies, as well as integrated security, to deliver automated and assisted solutions targeted to Enterprise needs.

“The technologies that support Intelligent Assistance are maturing rapidly,” explains Dan Miller, Lead Analyst at Opus Research. “Nuance’s new capabilities are examples of requirements gleaned from real-world implementations, and benefit brands supporting consistent intelligent assistance across multiple customer engagement channels.”

Today, Nuance announces expansions and enhancements to its AI-powered Digital Customer Engagement Platform, including:

• Nuance Nina™ for Amazon® Alexa™: For the first time, Nuance is bringing enterprise customer engagement to the Internet-of-Things world, by teaming two VAs – Nuance Nina and Amazon Alexa.  Enterprises that use Nina can now engage with their consumers through all devices that support Amazon Alexa, including the Amazon Echo™. Delivered as an Alexa Skill, any enterprise that implements Nina - a bank, airline, telco, retail, government organization and more – can leverage that investment to engage through Alexa-powered devices. See the announcement here.
  
  
• Message-Based Customer Service via Asynchronous Messaging: Nuance Nina has supported real-time messaging through Facebook, WeChat, and more for years. Now, Nuance is enabling live chat engagement that can be interrupted – or asynchronous – over time. Through asynchronous messaging, consumers can friend their bank for example, start a service conversation, put their phone in their pocket, return to the conversation – just as they do with their friends. Nuance’s agent-side infrastructure enables secure routing, team engagement and analytics that ensure questions are answered. For instance, a text-based conversation can start via an enterprise app, SMS, or Facebook Messenger, and move at the pace of engagement determined by the consumer. More information will be announced in the coming weeks.
  
  
• Nina Coach: Nina Coach enables enterprises to train and deploy their virtual assistant faster through automated learning based on live engagements and hidden human coaches. When the virtual assistant does not know an answer to a question, the conversation is seamlessly escalated to a live chat agent within the same engagement window and includes the transcript and history of the conversation. As a next step, the VA is trained from the live chat conversation, so it knows the answer on its own the next time. This learning loop between the VA and the live agent creates a seamless user experience while making the natural language understanding (NLU) technology smarter and more accurate over time. More information will be announced in the coming weeks.
  
  
• IVR to Digital: IVR self-service or agent-handled calls can be moved seamlessly to digital channels when appropriate via live chat or virtual assistants. Companies can speed call resolution and enhance the user experience by integrating the IVR with the power of digital. For example, instead of having a customer wait to speak with an agent on the phone, callers could transfer to a live chat session with an agent on the web or mobile for faster resolution. Or contact center agents can set up a co-browsing session on the web to help customers fix the problem themselves and better learn for the future. More information will be announced in the coming weeks.

A recent Forrester report (“Transform The Contact Center For Customer Service Excellence,” Forrester Research, Inc., May 1, 2017) stressed the importance for organizations to provide easy ways for consumers to engage in omni-channel dialogue to strengthen loyalty and retention, noting that 65% of US online adults view ‘valuing their time’ as the most important thing that a company can do to provide them with good service. Nuance’s omni-channel platform and unified tooling enable a write-once, deploy anywhere approach, providing a true benefit to organizations by offering a consistent consumer experience, without implementing and maintaining a number of one-off integrations.

“With the ever-evolving customer service landscape, and the proliferation of consumer touch-points, savvy businesses must evolve their customer service approach to easily and cost-effectively extend their investment to multiple channels,” said Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Division, Nuance. “Nuance’s ‘design once, deploy many’ approach allows businesses to communicate with consumers where, when, and how they want through a consistent experience across all channels including Web, mobile, messaging apps, SMS, and IoT devices such as the Amazon Echo. With the introduction of these AI innovations, Nuance will continue to provide the most advanced and comprehensive customer engagement portfolio in the market.”

To learn more about Nuance’s Digital Customer Engagement Platform, go here.

About Nuance Communications, Inc.

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.

Trademark reference: Nuance and the Nuance logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners.

Contact Information

For Press
Erica Hill
Nuance Communications, Inc.
Tel: 781-888-5518
[email protected]