In a move that will have a ripple effect throughout the Conversational Commerce and Intelligent Assistance realm, Interactions Corp. and AT&T have jointly announced the transfer of assets, personnel and technology associated with AT&T Watson to Massachusetts-based Interactions. From this day forward, Interactions will take the lead role in development, marketing, sales and integration of a full suite of automated speech recognition, text-to-speech, natural language understanding and voice biometric-based speaker ID and verification.

Interactions is one of a very short list of technology suppliers ready to make voice a key alternative in what company spokespeople call “The Interface of Things.”

Roughly 2½ years ago, AT&T began offering an API to the speech-starved development world that included the fruits of “more than one million hours of research and development in speech technologies, leading to more than 600 U.S. patents and patent applications.” These technologies have long been embedded in AT&T’s own customer care contact centers, as well as the nearly 10 year-old VoiceTone automated voice response platform that is offered on an outsourced basis. That said, marketing a conversational user interface has not been a priority of Ma Bell as it does battle for market share in the highly competitive world of the quadruple play (wireless communications plus broadband internet access, video entertainment programming delivery and phone service to the home).

Based on positive experience with the likes of Hyatt Hotels, Humana Healthcare, Lifelock and a dozen others, AT&T has gained confidence that Interactions is up to playing the roles necessary to popularize the new, natural “Interface of Things”. As we noted in mid-2013, the AT&T Watson technology has been foundational to the success of Interactions. Now the folks at Interations will take charge of broadening the go-to-market strategy for what had been a hidden gem (or set of gems) at AT&T.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: AT&T, Mergers and Acquisitions, Natural language processing