Nuance Releases New Enterprise Conversational AI Toolkit
Voice technology developer Nuance has released a bundle of its conversational artificial intelligence software to enable companies to design and build their own virtual assistants. The Nuance Mix suite of tools aims to make it relatively straightforward to create the AI that can interact and converse with customers.
Nuanced Assistance
Nuance Mix combines Nuance’s AI, machine learning, and speech recognition software into one bundle. The idea is not to create something brand new, but to make it easy and fast to build customized virtual assistants specialized for each business that makes them. That entails understanding and finding answers for customers, coordinating projects between employees, and generally enhancing the quality of a company’s work. The actual assistant can be deployed in voice or text form on the phone, via smart speakers, or through text messages and online chats.
Nuance Mix is already in use by Nuance clients who took part in the beta. The list of applications includes customer assistance for an airline and a mobile network, a clinical communication firm connecting its teams, and voice control for a video game console. To make the toolkit usable for all kinds of companies, Nuance set up the platform to offer both visual and technical interfaces. Companies don’t need technical experts to design and update their virtual assistants, but those clients with coders can approach their projects from that direction if they wish.
“Nuance Mix is built on decades of experience in conversational design across voice and chatbot solutions. It provides the scalable and flexible deployment options required to address the multifaceted needs of organizations, including meeting security and compliance demands,” said Nuance CTO Joe Petro said in a statement, “With Nuance Mix, organizations can use market-tested tools and expert-built models to design, develop, test and maintain their applications.”
Enterprise AI Expands
A growing number of companies are exploring ways to integrate voice and AI technologies into enterprise services. Salesforce, one of the largest enterprise companies, started offering ways for clients to design custom voice apps for its Einstein voice assistant platform last year, after working with Apple to create a Siri Shortcut for controlling its mobile app. Oracle also went ahead with building a voice assistant platform for its clients. Meanwhile, Microsoft has all but ended its consumer-facing AI products in favor of making the Cortana voice assistant solely an enterprise service.
The need for virtual customer service and coordinating people at a distance is even greater now, while the COVID-19 pandemic keeps people at home. That’s why virtual agent developer Inference Solutions designed a system for its clients to update their virtual agents with answers related to the pandemic and its effect on the client’s business. Similarly, Satisfi Labs created a pandemic-specific AI platform to answer the questions asked of its event and venue clients. Some of Nuance’s clients will likely use the new software to help smooth operations while people and businesses adjust to the ever-changing public health situation.
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