Tue, 01/08/2013 – 13:06 by Nuance Communications, which provides speech recognition services for enterprises (and increasingly consumers, including the Swype keyboard)
released a “mobile assistant” survey in connection with CES. The survey of roughly 1,000 US adults found that 75% of respondents had their mobile devices (presumably smartphones) “always on them” or “at hand.”
Among the 90% of survey respondents that reported they had some sort of assistant capability on their phones (not defined in the survey results), a majority (60%) said they used that assistant daily. The following were the most common use cases:
- Driving directions: 84%
- Weather: 72%
- Restaurant lookups/recommendations: 61%
This survey implies satisfaction is relatively high with these assistants. More than 80% of respondents indicated if they could they’d want the “same mobile personal assistant” with them at all times, across all devices and use cases: phones, tablets, PCs, cars, TVs, apps and so on. Accordingly the survey was partly intended to support Nuances “cross-device persona project” called Wintermute, which the company is showcasing at CES.
Using your unique voice print, the system remembers who you are and “follows you from one device to the next, remembering what you like, what you’ve been doing, and where you’ve been.” This is in a way a voice-version of what Google is trying to do in asking people to sign in to the Chrome browser so that it can monitor them across devices. In Google’s case it’s for the purpose of personalizing search results, serving better ads and collecting data on user behavior. Nuance seems to be focused more directly on improving the user experience.
Interestingly the survey also found that respondents had emotional connections (to varying degrees) to their assistants:
More than half of all respondents cited a personal connection with their mobile personal assistant. Women actually name their mobile personal assistant more than men, with 71% compared to a close 66% of men . . . 73% of men feel comfortable asking their mobile personal assistant for directions but 79% of women ask for help more often.
The materials I received don’t provide detail on whether the assistants in question are Nuance products (i.e., DragonGo) or Apple’s Siri or Google Voice Search/Now. It’s not clear how specifically the “personal assistant” idea was defined in the survey instrument.
The concept of the personal virtual assistant has been around for quite a long time, using a range of technologies and approaches. Yet crystallized in the public mind with the advent of Siri. Nuance, which provides speech recognition for Siri, recently introduced
Nina — a white label Siri-like assistant for enterprise customer service applications.
My colleague Authour recently
issued an expansive new report on personal virtual assistants and their adoption in the enterprise and on consumer devices.
Update: Nuance has
reportedly acquired
VirtuOZ, which is a provider of virtual-assistant enterprise customer care solutions with a PC focus. The VirtuOZ online assistant will be enhanced and improved by Nuance’s speech recognition capabilities and Nuance’s Nina offering will help expand its reach into online customer care.
