Netting It Out

Nina Mobile and Nina Web are the virtual assistant offerings from Nuance Communications, Inc. Customers ask questions or request actions of Nina Mobile’s virtual assistants by speaking or typing them. Nina Mobile’s virtual assistants deliver answers in voice and/or text. Nina Mobile responds in voice and/or text. Customers ask questions or request actions of Nina Web’s virtual assistants questions by typing them into text boxes. Nina Web responds in text. 

Nuance offers subscription licenses for Nina Mobile and Nina Web and the products deploy in the cloud using the facilities of third party cloud-computing providers.

Nina Mobile was introduced in 2012 and Nina Web was introduced on 2004. We estimate that approximately 15 Nina Mobile-based virtual assistants have been deployed in customer accounts and that 35 Nina Web-based virtual assistants have been deployed in customer accounts.

Nina “brings home” a mixed Report Card. It earns Exceeds Requirements grades for Supplier Viability and for Search, a key evaluation criterion for virtual assistant software. The product earns Meets Requirement Grades for Product Marketing, and Product Management. The product Needs Improvement in Knowledge Management because language and translation support are limited, and change control is too coarsely granular. It also Needs Improvement in Customer Service Integration because its APIs are not published and JavaScript is the only integration mechanism.

We recommend Nina Mobile and Nina Web to large B2C organizations in financial services, government, retail, telecommunications, and travel and entertainment to provide virtual assisted-service in just about any language. Nina Mobile and Nina Web can deliver personalized answers to customers’ questions or perform personalized actions on behalf of individual customers.

Nuance Nina

Nina is the virtual assistant offering from Nuance Communications. Nuance currently offers two, channel-specific Nina products on a common platform of natural language technology, design time tools, and runtime services:

NINA WEB. Nina Web provides virtual assisted-service through web browsers on PCs and on mobile devices. Customers ask questions or requests actions of Nina Web’s virtual assistants questions by typing them into text boxes. Nina Web was introduced in 2004. We estimate that approximately 35 Nina Web-based virtual assistants have been deployed in customer accounts.

NINA MOBILE. Nina Mobile provides virtual assisted-service on mobile devices. Customers ask questions or request actions of Nina Mobile’s virtual assistants questions by speaking or typing them. Nina Mobile’s virtual assistants deliver answers in speech and/or text. Nina Mobile was introduced in August 2012. We estimate that approximately 15 Nina Mobile-based virtual assistants have been deployed in customer accounts.

Nina deployments comprise:

• A Natural Language Model representing the questions that organizations expect their customers to ask, and the actions that their customers request
• A collection of predefined answers to customers’ questions
• The programming logic for accessing external resources required for performing customers’ requests for actions
• A UI for questions/action requests and answers/results of action requests.

Analysts and administrators use the Nina IQ Studio (NIQS) toolset and the Nuance Experience Studio (NES) to build and manage a Natural Language Model and to perform most initial deployment and ongoing management tasks. For Nina Mobile, Nuance also supplies an SDK (Software Developers’ Kit) to help deployments build and manage UIs, specify the programming logic to perform the actions requested by customer, and build and manage the answers to expected customers’ questions.

Nuance provides cloud-computing facilities for building and running Nina Web and Nina Mobile deployments. Nuance also provides professional services to help clients build and manage Nina deployments. Professional services assistance is critical to the success of Nina deployments.

Nuance

Nuance Communications, Inc. is a publicly held company (NASDAQ:NUAN) that was founded in 1994. The firm describes itself as “a leading provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers.”

Nuance organizes these solutions within four segments:

• Healthcare
• Mobile and Consumer
• Enterprise
• Imaging

Nina is developed, marketed, sold, and supported by the Enterprise segment.

Nuance is headquartered in Burlington, MA. The firm has a staff of approximately 14,000 employees and a customer base of approximately 8,000 accounts. In its most recent fiscal year, which ended on September 30, 2014, Nuance generated revenues of $1.9 billion and incurred a (GAAP) net loss of $150.3 million. The Enterprise segment contributed revenues of $357.1 million.

What’s New in Nina Virtual Assistants?

This Product Evaluation Report is an update to a report on Nina Web that we published on January 29, 2014. Since that date, Nina’s developers have been busy improving the offering. New and improved capabilities are very attractive. Nina is “smarter,” fits more applications and broader markets, and is faster and easier to deploy. Here’s what’s new in Nina:

• Nuance completed the migration of Nina Web’s analysis and matching engine from its original VirtuOz technology to Nuance NLU technology. Nina Web and Nina Mobile now have a common technology for analysis and matching, have common design time tools, and have a common platform for deployment runtimes.
• Nuance improved the NLU to answer more types of questions more accurately—typically more than 55 percent deflection out of the box.
• Nuance expanded Nina Web’s IQ Studio with the new Nuance Experience Studio (NES) toolset. NES lets analysts and administrators build and manage the grammars used by NLU for analysis and matching. Nina Mobile also uses NES.
• Nina Web and Nina Mobile have been certified PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant. PCI compliance means that Nina virtual assistants can perform ecommerce tasks for customers.
• Nuance added packaged integrations with external chat applications.
• Nuance added support for additional languages in the NLU, bringing the total number of supported languages to 43.
• Nina now packages three types of UIs: embedded, pop-in, and beam.
• Nuance has developed a new analytics platform for Nina, its Unified Data and Analytics. Nina Mobile supports the new capabilities. Nina Web will support them in a future version.

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