Nuance Communications is focused on helping companies to more cost-effectively manage customer interactions across channels – both when customers contact through the phone, web, and mobile and when organisations proactively reach out to them through voice, SMS, and e-mail, says Deepak Bhatia, Head- Sales, Enterprise and Mobility, Nuance Communications, India in conversation with Elets News Network (ENN)
Give us an overview of Nuance
Headquartered in US, Nuance has regional offices in 35 countries and Sales representation in 65 countries. It’s a leading provider of voice and language understanding solutions for businesses and consumers globally. Through Nuance’s proven solutions, technology becomes more humanised, as people interacting with devices most frequently adapt to them rather than people feeling forced to adapt to their devices.
An example of our technology is voice biometrics which uses the customer’s unique voiceprint for authentication. It can be passive, where the user can say anything and we match their voice to a voiceprint. Or it can be active, where the caller is asked to recite a passphrase.
How the breakthrough voice technologies by Nuance are ensuring change, especially in the financial sector?
In India, the financial inclusion programmes are witnessing a lot of potential in the authentication space for voice biometrics. Almost 300 financial institutions around the world have already adopted this technology. One of our voice biometric deployments is with ICICI bank. We are working with many other organisations for forthcoming launch as well. Nuance’s technology is leading the industry, demonstrated by 75% of Fortune 100 organisations working with us across every major industry.
Apart from Voice biometrics, what are the other technologies that need to enter global market, especially in India?
India has a booming economy and the entire Nuance product line is available in India. The four major technologies are ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition), Text to Speech, Voice Biometrics and Transcription. In ASR, we support 14 Indian regional languages and in Text to speech, we have seven languages, of which Hindi is brewing tremendous success.
The Fourth and the very important technology which has evolved in the last couple of years is the Nuance Transcription Engine (NTE). NTE for contact centers, a powerful, fast and accurate engine that can quickly transform large amounts of recorded audio into actionable assets across a wide range of industries including financial services, banks, telecoms, insurance, and airlines to improve the operational efficiency of contact centers, as well as improving the customer experience. NTE supports 21 languages and 36 dialects, including Indian English and Hindi. Nuance’s transcription engines can transform common human dialogue to text which can later be used by systems and algorithms to make the engine smarter and also help other systems perform better. Through these four major pillars, we want to develop the story of digital India.
How do you view the government initiated “Make in India” and “Digital India” programme?
Both these initiatives require a skilled workforce and are majorly driven by Skill India programme. We need people with high skills, so these are good initiative taken by government to create entrepreneurship and a skillful employable workforce.
What are your strategies to expand presence in India and become more visible?
The booming market and the increasing interest of customers and partners paved a way for us to look forward for partner model having upgraded skills. Our partners across world are interested in the technologies, they seek inputs on the new inventions, know-how and knowledge share. The future looks bright.
