Siri has a little company.
"Nina" is a virtual assistant helping users with functions like messaging, checking weather, or talking to the mobile banking application. The voice technology company, Naunce, which previously worked with Apple for Dragon Naturally Speaking line of voice applications and Dragon Dictation software lines, unveiled Nuance Interactive Natural Assistant, or Nina. It's targeted to enhance customer-service applications.
Naunce pulled together speech recognition, text-to-speech, natural-language understanding and voice-ID biometric technology and has bunched them into a hosted, cloud-based service which can be used by businesses, banks, and insurance companies making hosted, cloud-based service and customer service.
"Nina takes natural-language understanding, and it provides a way for a developer to add that into an app," Robert Weideman, executive vice president of Nuance's enterprise division told reporters.
Nina will let businesses build voice capabilities in their apps, using a software development kit. Nina is the first voice assistant with an SDK. She can be used for banks, hotels, retail industry and airline industry.
In a demo, Nina responded to commands like, "Pay my bill," and can even perform complex functions. But Nina is reliant on Voice Assistant Cloud without a network connection it cannot work. Its speed and ability depend on the quality of network connection.
Naunce has said that businesses will be able to choose from 40 different voices and they will also be able to customize it in their own voice "persona," if they already have one.
The differences between Nina and Siri is in its voice biometrics, meaning Nina can pick up who is talking to it.
"For the first time on a mobile device, our virtual assistant doesn't just understand what you said and what you want, we can actually understand who said it," Weideman said.
The SDK for Nina was released on Monday.