On Tuesday, Jan 18, Nuance formally announced a “strategic partnership” with Genesys by offering mutual customers “integrated access” to a portfolio of “Nuance Contact Center AI” resources. The package of APIs, simplifies enterprises’ ability to purchase and integrate AI-infused resources that specifically address conversational customer engagement, biometric authentication and agent efficiency.

Opus Research anticipated this offer in a post entitled “Genesys Establishes a New Multi-Cloud Ecosystem; How Nuance Customers Could Benefit” back in August 2020. In it, we noted that Nuance “has almost two decades of experience with Genesys and its large enterprise clients because Nuance Recognizer (automated speech recognition) and Vocalizer (text-to-speech) were foundational technologies for speech-enabling the Genesys Voice Portal (GVP).” We also noted that the two companies were “re-architecting their solutions in parallel,” a set of tasks which culminated in Tuesday’s announcement. For more detail on Nuance CCAI, visit this site.

The Microsoft Factor

The Nuance/Genesys partnership is taking shape in the midst of Microsoft acquiring Nuance. It is a process that started last April, but is said to be more certain now that it has gained EU approval. Initially, Microsoft’s CEO said the merger would center around opportunities in healthcare, it is more and more evident that the addition of Nuance’s technologies is destined to accelerate the evolution of Microsoft’s branded cloud, Azure, into a more formidable rendition of the Conversational Cloud, vying for competitive advantage versus AWS (which supports Amazon Connect and related AI) and Google’s cloud (with its own packaging of Contact Center AI).

Genesys, for its part, has a partnership with Microsoft which started to take shape in mid-2018 to address its business customers concern with “lock in” to a single-cloud solution (meaning AWS). It was formally rolled out in March 2021 with mature integrations of Genesys CX Contact Center on Azure and cloud-based integrations of Microsoft Dynamics 365. Now they can add Nuance’s Conversational AI to an Azure-colored rendition of the Conversational Cloud.

Even though it sounds confusing, enterprises are destined to benefit from competitive offerings of the giants of cloud-based infrastructure. They will have to compete on ease of installation and speed to results, in addition to price.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication