Nuance Launches Nina – Siri-Like Virtual Assistant For Customer Service Apps

Nuance Communications has just launched Nina - a personal assistant service for apps. Nuance has released a Nuance virtual assistant SDK, which can be used by developers to offer a Siri-like virtual assistant feature in their apps.

This is an interesting development as Apple's Siri currently works with only built-in apps and third party services such as Wikipedia, Yelp and Wolfram Alpha.

Since Nuance powers Siri's back-end, this is the next best thing for developers who are looking to add Siri-like virtual assistant feature to their apps, especially for customer service apps.

We were hoping that Apple will introduce APIs for Siri in iOS 6, which would allow developers to integrate their apps with Siri. But as you know, that didn't happen.


“USAA’s innovative solutions are designed to make life easier for our highly mobile military service members, and increasingly for all members who now expect to get things done when, where and how they want.” said Neff Hudson, assistant vice president of emerging channels for USAA. “We believe that the virtual assistant has tremendous potential to make it simpler, faster and more satisfying for our members to manage their financial affairs on their mobile devices.”

Nina is significant because it is the first virtual assistant customer service app to incorporate both speech recognition and voice biometrics into a single integrated solution. Nina is also the first solution that provides an open software development kit (SDK) to support the rapid integration of virtual assistant capabilities into existing mobile applications. In addition, Nina is the first to allow organizations to brand their own virtual assistant persona, including the visual appearance and implementation of optional custom TTS voices.

“Nina is a watershed innovation for the automated customer service industry, not only because it brings the virtual assistant directly into an app, but because it raises the bar through its level of interactive dialog and language understanding,” said Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager of the Nuance Enterprise Division. “Nina provides our customers a major competitive differentiator by enabling more successful self-service through their mobile apps. We are especially pleased to further our partnership with USAA, a company known for its innovation and approach to delivering a premier mobile customer service experience to its members.”

Nuance has announced that USAA, a leading financial services provider has integrated Nina virtual assistant in their mobile app. USAA and Nuance plan to start the pilot in August. They plan to release the app featuring the Nina virtual assistant early next year.