Nuance Provides Voice Assistant and Live Chat Tech for Albertsons Grocery Stores

The US grocery retailer Albertsons is turning to Nuance Communications to deliver better online services to its customers. Albertsons will specifically be deploying Nuance’s Intelligent Engagement Platform, which includes a voice assistant and live chat capabilities.

The solution will allow Albertsons to be more responsive to the needs of people who are doing their grocery shopping online during the COVID-19 pandemic. The voice assistant and live chat features will let Albertsons process a greater number of requests, and answer any questions shoppers may have about delivery, store hours, and product availability.

Albertsons currently operates more than 2,200 stores spread across 34 states. Its portfolio also includes Safeway, Randalls, Jewel Osco, Pavilions, and Tom Thumb, all of which will now benefit from Nuance’s AI technology.

“Our associates are fully committed to assisting our customers in the stores, and now we can extend that same experience to our digital channels,” said Albertsons EVP and Chief Customer and Digital Officer Chris Rupp.

“We help organizations solve real problems through Conversational AI,” added Nuance EVP and CTO Joe Petro. “We are fortunate to partner with Albertsons as they put their customers’ experiences and needs at the center of their business.”

The news suggests that Nuance is looking to expand its footprint beyond the healthcare industry on which it has focused in recent years. The company is best known for Dragon Medical One, an electronic health records solution that leverages speech recognition to facilitate the creation of patient records. It has also released an ambient clinical intelligence solution to further automate the records process.

The partnership with Albertsons simply demonstrates that voice technology has many applications in other industries, especially when more people are opting to do business online rather than in person. Nuance upgraded the Intelligent Engagement Platform in September to make it easier for enterprises to develop and deploy their own conversational AI solutions.  

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May 7, 2020 – by Eric Weiss