Nuance Communications has incorporated some new technologies into its Nuance On-Demand network service.

Nuance Recognizer v9, SmartListener, RealSpeak 4.5 and Nuance Notification Hub have been added to enhance Nuance's speech technology.

"This is a key phase in our effort to help our clients evolve the way they interact with consumers," said Assaf Bacui, director of product management and marketing at Nuance.

Nuance is a provider of speech and imaging technology for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services aim to make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information.

Nuance Recognizer v9 delivers recognition accuracy, enabling a more natural, flexible user interface that gives users increasingly unique and personalized experiences in an automated environment.

Recognizer v9 has a 27 percent error reduction rate across multiple tasks and languages over its predecessors.

It has a 45 percent improvement in detecting speech in noisy environments, a critical function to help ensure speech applications perform well for mobile callers.

SmartListener is a key component of Recognizer v9.

It improves application automation and the overall caller experience by handling unexpected words or phrases used by callers.

These out-of-grammar inputs are the primary cause of callers failing to stay in an automated customer service technology they have started using.

Smart Listener accurately interprets the meaning of these inputs.

RealSpeak 4.5 is a text-to-speech engine that takes text as input from a variety of sources and converts it into natural sounding speech output.

It is ideal for presenting content such as news, weather, account data and stock prices
Realspeak's features and enhancements deliver better accuracy, system density and tunability.

Nuance Notification Hub presents an outbound tool that enables automated, actionable SMS, email or voice notifications at specific points in the customer lifecycle.

This technology can recognize whether it is receiving a busy signal, voicemail, live person or fax, and take the appropriate action.

These notifications not only reduce inbound call volumes, they also increase customer satisfaction and create new revenue opportunities by proactively contacting consumers with personalized, timely and relevant communications.

"The strategy is to provide an improved customer experience and help our clients realize the significant cost reductions of our on-demand technology," Mr. Bacui said. "We are telling the market that they can get it from us, on demand if they are not sure of the level of investment they want."