Nuance Launches Nina: Virtual Assistant for Mobile Customer Service Apps

By David Tobia
August 10, 2012

Nuance Communications has announced the availability of its open SDK for “Nina,” a new virtual assistant designed 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,” explains the press release.
“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,” adds the release.
The company claims that Nina is the first virtual assistant customer service app to utilize both speech recognition and voice biometrics. Companies can customize Nina to fit their brand image. They can alter the visual appearance and implement optional 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,” suggests Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager of the Nuance Enterprise Division.
The SDK and cloud service is currently available in English versions for the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. Additional languages will be available later in 2012.

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