IP Australia, the country’s intellectual property agency, has launched a virtual assistant to help customers calling in with questions. Called ‘Alex’, the virtual entity is based on Nuance Communications’ virtual assistant platform, called ‘Nina’.
Alex is designed to answer callers’ questions about trade mark registration and related issues, and to evolve its knowledge base as it has more and more interactions with callers. In a statement announcing the deployment, Nuance asserted that initial results indicate that the AI assistant can resolve 80 percent of customer inquiries, and IP Australia Director General Patricia Kelly asserted that it “enables us to provide an intelligent, 24-hour self-service customer experience.”
While Nuance is primarily known for its voice and speech recognition technologies, its entry into the AI assistant market is almost a natural progression, given how such technologies have become so intertwined with the rise of voice-based AI systems like Siri and Cortana. Voice-based interaction could become the primary user interface for the Internet of Things, with AI technology likely to play an increasingly prominent role in such interactions as well, and Nuance appears poised to take advantage of these developments.
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August 11th, 2016 – by Alex Perala
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