Nuance’s Nina adds voice assistant to Alexa

Nuance says it is all about delivering enterprise specific assistance via Nina as an Alexa skill. By integrating Nina with Smart Home IoT devices, Nuance is enabling a new way for consumers to connect with their bank, airline, telco and retail brands, without needing to dial a phone number.

For leading brands, Nuance makes it easy to service customers through new devices, leveraging existing investments in Nuance customer engagement solutions.

Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Division, Nuance, said, “With Nina, we’re able to provide enterprises with the ability to design a VA once, then deploy it across the channels on which their customers choose to engage, securely and affordably. Nina for Amazon Alexa is the first example where Nina enables engagement through IoT devices, and the first example where two virtual assistants – Nuance Nina and Amazon Alexa – work together to deliver a superior customer experience.”

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First introduced in 2012, Nina was the first virtual assistant for customer service, and has since evolved to become a powerful “design once, deploy many” customer engagement platform that supports a consistent experience across Web, Mobile, IVR, Messaging, (e.g. Facebook Messenger and SMS), and now IoT channels such as the Amazon Echo via Alexa.

Nina provides organisations with the ability to efficiently and effectively broaden their customer engagement footprint, as opposed to building implementations separately for each channel. In this way, Nina significantly lowers the total cost of development and ownership and gives organisations control over their brand experience. Finally, by leveraging Nina, organisations can ensure data is secure and private and is not monetised by other platforms for advertising or financial gain. 

Nina leverages Nuance’s proven conversational, cognitive and human-assisted AI capabilities to deliver superior, multi-channel, automated customer service experiences for the consumers. Nina provides an innovative blend of automated and live chat assistance, to deliver high levels of customer satisfaction, and cost savings for the enterprise.

The award-winning Nuance Nina has been adopted globally by leading brands and organisations, including the Australian Taxation Office, Coca-Cola, Domino’s, Garanti Bank, ING Netherlands, IP Australia, Jetstar, Swedbank, USAA Bank, Windstream and more. Most recently, Domino’s Australia announced that Nina is powering the Domino’s DRU Assist virtual assistant.

Further information provided by Nuance follows the video.

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

Nuance's digital engagement platform advances AI innovations for global markets; Adds Nina for Amazon Alexa, Asynchronous Messaging, Nina Coach, and IVR to its Digital Engagement Platform.

Nuance Communications, Inc. has 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 organisation 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.

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