As markets mature, incumbents distinguish themselves by capitalizing on long-term branding and R&D investment, while insurgents put pressure on with new features and functions that they hope will gain traction. A flurry of new announcements in the Intelligent Agent domain show that we’re witnessing a maturing market. With its acquisition of Novauris, Apple has acquihired a team of speech recognition technology developers who have optimized their engine for search of large databases and tweaked it to run as an embedded mobile resource or in the cloud. Novauris’ long-time CEO Yoon Kim, is now an Apple employee “working on improving Siri,” where his know-how (along with Novauris’ IP) will be a tremendous asset in the overall objective of helping people “get things done just by using your voice.”

Among the other incumbents, Microsoft finally introduced the world to the long-rumored (and still in beta) Cortana personal assistant as part of the April 2 Build 2014, the launch event for Windows Phone 8.1. Instead of taking on a human form, Cortana (which started its cyber-life as an assistant in the xBox game Halo) looks something like a halo. It supports spoken or keyed in commands and responds using the same actress, Jen Taylor, who provides the voice for the videogame’s Cortana. What is especially noteworthy in this case is that the knowledge base that “powers” Cortana’s search function is Bing. Put another way, the new mobile UI for Bing is Cortana. Thus it is poised to demonstrate the power of natural language understanding to simplify the search process.

But Cortana won’t stop with simple search. As Greg Sterling described in this article in Marketing Land, Cortana will be a persistent presence across multiple devices and screens and will become a source of “deep personalization” for Microsoft applications and device functions. This, Microsoft believes will make it a big differentiator versus Siri or Google Now and certainly much moire than “Clippy redux.”Nuance, another incumbent in the speech-enabled virtual assistant world, is also upping its game by adding a voiceprint to its Dragon Mobile Assistant. This is a wise move when it comes to personalizing functions and services. Launched on the day before Cortana’s formal debut, the new version of Dragon Mobile Assistant is available for Android-based devices from Google Play. Once it is downloaded, users will be prompted to enroll their voiceprint by saying “Hello Dragon” a few times to build the voiceprint. Then they can use the phrase as a “wake-up” word for the device, which is a security feature, and they can use their voice to dictate and send messages, control device functions and carry out voice searches.

As for action on the insurgent  front, Artificial Solutions is taking an innovative approach to supporting humanlike interactions or conversations with a number of virtual assistants – each with domain-specific expertise. Called the Teneo Network of Knowledge, it is a patented framework that enables a personal agent to refer questions to other virtual assistants. These resources can identify themselves explicitly or may just appear in an answer screen or speak as an anonymous source. Of course they could also explicitly be presented as the branded persona or automated agent of a retailer, airline, hotel chain, telco or other business enterprise.

All of these actions signal the emergence of a very real, maturing market for intelligent assistants.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Voice biometrics, Microsoft, Nuance, Apple, Natural Language, Siri, intelligent Assistants