Nuance Unveils Nuance Voice Search, Breakthrough Solutions

The solutions introduce a revolutionary technology framework that gives callers, either from wireline or wireless phones, faster and easier access to the information they need, while simultaneously increasing call automation rates for carriers and service providers. Within this speech environment, NVS introduces newly created capabilities for automated DA with interpretative capabilities and new applications for business category search and advertiser-supported search.

From a foundation of unparalleled speech resources and the experience gained from automating tens of billions of calls, Nuance delivers an optimized caller experience by interpreting what callers want, and then delivering information to them, quickly and accurately. The cornerstone of the solutions portfolio is an entirely new speech solution that delivers a more natural and interactive experience for callers. Unlike traditional systems that fail when they cannot match a caller's request to an exact listing from the database, Nuance Voice Search can interpret a search request irrespective of ambiguity or incomplete information.

"Nuance has pioneered the use of speech technology to conduct information searches, and now powers more voice search requests than any other vendor," said Michael Thompson, general manager and vice president, Telecommunications, Search and Communications, at Nuance. "Significant advances from our research laboratories, coupled with real-world data from the world's largest speech implementations, have created a significant leap forward over other solutions available today. Only Nuance can provide carriers and providers with the comprehensive, speech-based directory solutions that support the broad range of applications and opportunities in this market."

At the heart of the Nuance Voice Search solutions is the Nuance Super Search technology with unprecedented recognition capabilities that are crafted specifically to the task of applying speech to Directory Assistance requests. The solutions recognize an exceptionally broad range of words and phrases applied to tens of millions of listings, without requiring highly complex, manually created vocabularies and grammar rules. Several key patent-pending technologies from Nuance deliver the superior performance of the Nuance Super Search including:

- Unsupervised Learning - Nuance Voice Search is the industry's first solution to use Nuance's patent-pending Unsupervised Learning, an application of artificial intelligence capabilities. Using the new technology, NVS-based deployments can continuously and automatically improve performance by learning from operator actions for manually routed calls, automatically generating statistical rules that push search performance higher. For example, if Joe's BBQ Shack is frequently requested by callers as "Joe's Barbecue," then as operators manually direct requests for Joe's Barbecue to the Joe's BBQ Shack listing, the Super Search Engine will recognize that trend and begin to automate that routing rule.

- Dynamic Disambiguation - Nuance Voice Search uses a state-of-the-art, patent-pending disambiguation engine to reduce the number of qualifying questions asked of callers before getting a desired listing. The result is a faster, more natural caller experience. For example, if a caller says: "Uh, the Safeway please," traditional systems will typically respond with "I'm sorry I didn't understand that, just say the listing name," then the system will ask "on what street?" and finally it might ask "for what department?". By contrast, NVS reduces the steps from three to one by simply saying: "For Safeway, I found the following listings - Safeway Corporate headquarters, Safeway market on St. Josephs Street, and Safeway customer service on Stoneridge Ave. Which do you prefer?" The result is a very positive caller experience, quickly connecting callers to the information they need, in a fully automated way - Nuance.