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August 06, 2012

Meet Nina, the New Mobile Virtual Assistant from Nuance Communications

Nuance Communications, a veteran provider of digital voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers, today introduced Nina, a virtual assistant for mobile customer service apps. Nuance happens to provide the core underlying technology for Siri, and as such Nina is in many ways related to Siri.

While Siri is an iPhone-specific technology, Nina is a platform that any software development team can use to add speech-based virtual assistant capabilities to any existing iOS and Android mobile apps. Nuance claims that Nina is the first solution to provide an open software development kit to support the rapid integration of virtual assistant capabilities into existing mobile applications. Central to the value of Nina is that it will allow organizations to brand their own virtual assistant personas, including the visual appearance and implementation of optional custom Text-to-Speech (TTS) voices.

In particular companies can offer fully customized “digital assistants” as a key means of enhancing self-service experiences for their customers. The Nina platform combines Nuance speech recognition, TTS, voice biometrics and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology, hosted in the cloud to provide an interactive user experience that not only understands what is said, but that also can identify who is saying it.

Nina is especially significant for this reason – it is the first virtual assistant for mobile customer service apps to incorporate both speech recognition and voice biometrics into a single integrated solution.

"Nina truly raises the bar through its level of interactive dialog and language understanding," noted Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager of the Nuance Enterprise Division. "Nina delivers a major competitive differentiator for our customers by enabling engaging self-service capabilities through their mobile apps."

The Nina Virtual Assistant consists of:

  • Nina Virtual Assistant Persona: The Nina virtual assistant persona is preconfigured, which developers can leverage directly for their app. Developers can also use the available source code to quickly create custom personas, 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, made up of the following 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. These 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, and government, among others.
  • Nina Virtual Assistant Cloud: The power and intelligence 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 are available now from Nuance in U.S., U.K. and Australian English. Additional languages will be made available later this year. Nuance can also provide professional services in support of Nina and virtual assistant implementations.

A Customer in Hand…

Nuance also announced that financial services provider USAA, which serves members of the U.S. military, veterans and their families, has adopted the virtual assistant for use within its mobile app. A pilot is planned for August and the functionality will launch to all USAA members early in 2013.

"USAA's looks 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."

It will be interesting to see how well Nuance and Nina can deliver in terms of allowing businesses to make Nina as real a character as possible. Apple has spent a lot of money advertising Siri specifically as a “character” – one with personality and a sense of humor (as unreal as this advertising Siri is from the real Siri, the ads to in fact communicate not a technology but a character), and this is what makes the difference).

A potential problem is if we end up with a proliferation of similar sounding Nina “zombies” among a variety of Nuance customers – the clear need in order to deliver true competitive differentiation is to ensure that Nina itself is truly differentiated. Nuance needs to work closely with its customers to ensure this is the case. Meanwhile, we’ll be keeping an eye out for what USAA cobbles together for its pilot – hopefully it won’t sound like Siri and will deliver some unique value = that will be the real proof point.


Want to learn more about today’s powerful mobile Internet ecosystem? Then be sure to attend the
Mobility Tech Conference & Expo, collocated with ITEXPO West 2012 taking place Oct. 2-5 2012, in Austin, TX. Co-sponsored by TMC Partner Crossfire Media the Mobility Tech Conference & Expo provides unmatched networking opportunities and a robust conference program representing the mobile ecosystem. The conference not only brings together the best and brightest in the wireless industry, it actually spans the communications and technology industry. For more information on registering for the Mobility Tech Conference & Expo click here.

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Tony Rizzo has spent over 25 years in high tech publishing and joins MobilityTechzone after a stint as Editor in Chief of Mobile Enterprise Magazine, which followed a two year stretch on the mobile vendor side of the world. Tony also spent five years as the Director of Mobile Research for 451 Research. Before his jump into mobility Tony spent a year as a publishing consultant for CMP Media, and served as the Editor in Chief of Internet World, NetGuide and Network Computing. He was the founding Technical Editor of Microsoft Systems Journal.

Edited by Braden Becker


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