BURLINGTON, Mass., June 20, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:NUAN) today announced Nina Coach to enable a new generation of virtual assistants as part of a series of innovations for human-like and conversational AI technologies. With Nina Coach, organizations will be able to train and deploy a virtual assistant faster than ever before by tapping into artificial intelligence and leveraging existing human knowledge.

Virtual assistant usage is on the rise, with Gartner predicting that by 2020 at least 80% of new enterprise application releases will make strong use of chatbots for conversational, AI-rich applications*. Just as students learn the fundamentals through basic schooling and then move onto college to concentrate on a focused area, the next generation of virtual assistants need to become smarter and more specialized in this same way. This optimization is now possible through Nina Coach, which equips the VA with pre-existing knowledge such as chat transcripts and industry-specific dialogue from the start for a faster time to market. With today's announcement, Nina will leverage AI and human assistance from live engagements to constantly improve the VA's knowledge and natural language understanding (NLU).

Through Nina Coach, when the virtual assistant has low confidence or does not know an answer to a consumer's question, a live chat agent seamlessly enters the conversation, within the same engagement window, and has visibility into the transcript and history of the conversation. The human assistant can then either choose the best answer from a list of choices identified by the virtual assistant, or type in a separate response. As a next step, the action is recorded, analyzed, and folded back into Nina's semantic brain. This learning loop makes the NLU technology smarter and more accurate over time, so the virtual assistant knows the answer on its own moving forward.

"There is simply no one-size-fits-all when it comes to offering an intelligent virtual assistant for customer service and simple question/answer bots no longer make the cut. Instead, these customer service virtual assistants, or chatbots, need to be smarter and capable of answering whatever question is posed to them regarding a particular domain," said Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Division, Nuance. "Adding cognitive, data-driven machine learning through Nina Coach will enable organizations to more quickly and accurately understand consumers' intents and tailor content from the start. These more accurate and intuitive conversations build brand loyalty, reduce churn, and ultimately help organizations to obtain a faster ROI."

Nina Coach provides the following benefits to organizations:

• Reduced deployment time of Nina by creating a new virtual assistant faster, utilizing existing chat transcripts
• Improved customer satisfaction through leveraging a hidden, human agent in case the virtual assistant doesn't know the answer
• Reduced cost for optimization of the virtual assistant as Nina continuously learns from agent inputs

For more information about Nina Coach, please go here.

*Gartner, Inc. "Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017: Conversational Systems," March 21, 2017.

Trademark reference: Nuance and the Nuance logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners.

Contact Information

For Press
Karen Link
Nuance Communications, Inc.
Tel: 781-565-4797
[email protected]