NICE Systems has agreed to acquire speech analytics specialist Nexidia for approximately $135 million. NICE calls the results of the combined portfolio “Analytics Without Limits.” This positioning takes into account the demonstrated high levels of accuracy for Nexidia’s analytic engines; unprecedented speed in performing analytics and delivering reports; a “vendor-agnostic” approach to integrating with existing contact center and call recording resources; flexible deployment models that span full ownership, quick deployment in the cloud or operation as a managed service; and scalability that starts with the “smallest footprint and lowest TCO” of alternatives vendors.

While the stated objective of the transaction is to dominate the Interactions Analytics (IA) domain as it is today, Opus Research sees its long-term value to be in the area of Intelligent Assistants (the other “IA”). The combination of NICE’s long-standing investment in Real Time Analytics, speaker differentiation and emotion detection will dovetail nicely with Nexidia’s proven speed, accuracy and flexible consumption model.

NICE is playing the long game with the Nexidia acquisition. It will start by promoting use cases that make the combined technologies into instances that create business value, preferably “beyond the Contact Center.” The historic stronghold for Speech Analytics was in agent training, workforce optimization and compliance, NICE intends to leverage Nexidia’s ability to derive insights from spoken conversations and distribute results of the insights among Marketing, Operations and Customer Experience execs where they can support operational objectives surrounding customer retention, sales revenue increases, reduced truck rolls and the like.

The next step (which may actually be something of a leap) is from Interaction Analytics to Intelligent Assistants. NICE is well-positioned to aim its real-time analytics engine at a information from a larger variety of sources and conversations, crossing multiple channels and media. It has a real-time decisioning engine that is most frequently used to provide agents with prompts for the “next-best-action” but could also respond to input from customers directly. Thus it is not very far at all from offering the sort of answers, suggestions or recommendations that are characteristics of an Intelligent Assistant.

We must also note that NICE (along with Nuance) is experiencing growing success with “passive,” Real Time Authentication. They support high levels of security and personalization by authenticating callers “in the background” as they converse with a live agent, financial advisor or IVR system. Slowly, but surely, leading vendors like NICE are assembling the technological underpinnings and use cases for secure, Intelligent Assistants.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication

Tags: speech analytics, NICE Systems, intelligent Assistants, interaction analytics