Nuance adds brains to voice search

Carriers can give directory assistance more quickly and make the experience more natural for users with new Nuance Communications voice-recognition software, the company said Tuesday.

Nuance introduced a portfolio of directory assistance software, Nuance Voice Search (NVS), designed for carriers and other service providers. It includes tools for answering direct caller queries, delivering a list of options in response to category requests, and providing free, advertiser-supported business listings.

NVS changes the directory assistance game because it can learn from failures -- by paying attention to where human operators send callers after they take over when the software can't fulfill a request -- and can cut down the number of questions it asks, according to Nuance.

Voice recognition has become a hot topic with the rise of more powerful mobile phones and faster networks that let users ask for things instead of having to use a tiny numeric keypad to spell out words. Last week Google launched an experimental service called Google Voice Local Search to field requests for local businesses and send callers through to their numbers. Microsoft last month acquired Tellme Networks, provider of a voice-enabled directory assistance platform and mobile search services. Nuance itself, a major voice-recognition player, last year acquired MobileVoiceControl for its technology that allows dictating e-mail and text messages, calling contacts and carrying out other functions on mobile phones.

NVS can be used to answer requests on both fixed and mobile calls, said Peter Mahoney, Nuance's vice president of worldwide marketing. It steps up from Nuance's existing voice search technology with two new key features. One is Unsupervised Learning, artificial intelligence software that learns from manually routed calls.

The other key enhancement is Dynamic Disambiguation, which is designed to reduce the number of questions callers are asked when a request doesn't match an exact result. If there are multiple listings that match the request, NVS can recite them and let the caller choose.

In addition to the NVS-Directory Assistance application, those technologies go into two other applications in the portfolio. NVS-Business Categories is a "yellow pages" service for searching by category. It can respond to a variety of phrases or terms for types of listings, cities and states. NVS-Free DA is designed for directory assistance services that are supported by advertising, so the request can be fed into an advertising engine that comes up with a relevant ad.

The new technologies in NVS will be integrated into Nuance Voice Control, the mobile search product derived from the MobileVoiceControl acquisition, in the next few months, Mahoney said. Over the coming months, the new capabilities will go into all of Nuance's product lines, including its speech-enabled attendant software for enterprise phone systems.

Nuance is now working to take voice-enabled search beyond directory listings and let consumers retrieve useful information, such as news, and even entertainment, Mahoney said. That trend has begun with Nuance Voice Control, already offered by Sprint Nextel and Rogers Wireless.