Nuance Communications is integrating its Intelligent Engagement AI Services into Rakuten Mobile’s Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP). The strategic partnership will allow any companies affiliated with the Rakuten Group to use Nuance’s Conversational AI in their own customer-facing applications.
RCP is a cloud-native mobile communications platform, and is the first such platform to offer built-in support for Nuance’s conversational technologies. The company’s software portfolio includes APIs that can be used to develop apps with speech recognition, text-to-speech, and natural language understanding capabilities, all of which will allow users to issue simple voice commands and interact with various devices using speech as their primary form of input. The Conversational AI Services also support biometric authentication through voice recognition.
The Engagement AI Service, on the other hand, will allow companies to provide better customer service across multiple channels. Meanwhile, the Nuance Mix Rapid AppDev Environment will dramatically reduce the amount of time that organizations need to develop, test, and launch new speech-based solutions, including virtual assistants.
The Rakuten Virtual Assistant in the Rakuten Link app will be the first program to integrate Nuance technology as part of the new partnership. The Assistant provides Rakuten Mobile customers with access to a number of different self-service applications.
“We are creating an innovative telco cloud platform that will drive a better AI-based customer engagement experience,” said Rakuten Mobile EVP and CTO Tareq Amin.
“Our investment in cloud-native technologies and verticalized solutions allows us to integrate Nuance technologies in a flexible way, embedding into client workflows and safeguarding consumer data,” added Nuance CTO Joe Petro. “We see great potential for Nuance’s AI solutions as organizations around the globe look to advance customer experiences and drive new revenue opportunities through cloud-based infrastructures and 5G networks.”
Rakuten is hoping to support digital transformation and provide a better customer experience as it transitions to a 5G environment. Nuance has provided voice assistant technology for the Albertsons grocery chain and the ride-hailing specialist Cabify in the past few months.
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