In October 1997 Bill Gates (News - Alert) said, "In this 10-year time frame . . . we will have perfected speech recognition and speech output well enough that those will become a standard part of the interface."
He might have been a bit optimistic on the time frame, but speech recognition is becoming an essential tool on our computing devices, especially mobile. Having an accurate speech recognition technology means not having to type on your smartphone or tablet and still use the applications effectively. One of the companies that has revolutionized the technology is Nuance (News - Alert), and it has unveiled yet another innovation with an advancement in conversational multichannel customer self-service.
With so many touch points available to consumers, next-generation IVR solutions are increasingly becoming as one of the preferred options. If an IVR solution uses a highly accurate speech recognition technology, businesses will be able to deploy conversational customer self-service consumers can use without the assistance of call center agents.
Nuance has been developing natural language understanding (NLU), conversational interfaces, and artificial intelligence since it was founded, and the new innovations it has developed have been designed to address the customer service sector.
According to the company, with this new platform in place it would lower costs, personalize and engage multichannel self-service experience and surpass the customer service expectations consumers have today with automated solutions.
A recent survey conducted by Nuance revealed that 83 percent of consumers would recommend a conversational IVR system that uses natural language understanding to carry out the services. Additionally, 73 percent of them also said their experience significantly improves by interacting with an automated system they could converse with directly.
The capabilities of the new platform include:
Automation Assist – designed to extend the benefits of self-service automation to complex scenarios, such as capturing email addresses, alpha-numeric case number and multi-part forms by allowing human agents to silently assist.
Two-Way SMS with NLU Automation – text messaging has been improved for customer service by enhancing real-time two-way capabilities with NLU to remove the constraints of traditional text dialog.
Nuance Experience Studio – extends the ability to rapidly optimize NLU grammars to the enterprise, leveraging investment in one channel across other channels, thereby lowering the total cost of ownership associated with intelligent self-service systems.
The company has also used AI as part of the self-service experience by extending partnerships with large organizations. It has developed a framework that lets automated self-service systems to learn and improve the more they collaborate with humans. Nuance looks to provide the right balance to AI that is capable of delivering real value in the customer service ecosystem.
“Nuance is leveraging our vast experience in speech, natural language understanding and AI to help companies truly connect with consumers in a way that’s personalized, conversational, consistent, persistent and anticipatory,” said Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager, Nuance Enterprise.
Edited by Dominick Sorrentino