USAA Turns to Voice Recognition for Mobile Customer Service

USAA has adopted the speech-recognition virtual assistant from Nuance Communications Inc. for use within its mobile app. A pilot is planned for August, and the functionality will launch to all USAA members in early-2013.

Nuance announced the release of Nina, a virtual assistant for mobile customer service apps that allows companies to add speech-based virtual assistant capabilities to existing iOS and Android mobile apps, the same statement. Nina combines Nuance speech recognition, Text-to-Speech (TTS), voice biometrics, and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology, hosted in the cloud.

Nuance added in the release that Nina provides an open software development kit to support the integration of virtual assistant capabilities into existing mobile applications. In addition, Nina allows organizations to brand their own virtual assistant persona, including the visual appearance and implementation of optional custom TTS voices.

The Nina Virtual Assistant for customer service is comprised of Nina Virtual Assistant Persona; Nina Virtual Assistant SDK; Nina Core APIs; Nina Virtual Assistant APIs; Nina Reference Designs; Nina Virtual Assistant Cloud, says Nuance. The Nina Virtual Assistant SDK and cloud service are available from Nuance in United States, United Kingdom and Australian English, with additional languages to be made available later this year.

 

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