Nuance, Plantronics & Attensity: Taking Voice Digitization Beyond Words

With Peter Mahoney, CMO, Nuance Communications; Cary Bran, Senior Director, Innovation and New Ventures, Plantronics; and Kirsten Bay, President and CEO, Attensity Group; hosted by Stephen Socolof, Managing Partner, New Venture Partners

Peter Mahoney: Nuance has much broader world-view than voice recognition and voice synthesis. They are reinventing the relationship between people and technology. Motion, gesture, context, personalization are all required for smarter systems.

• Nuance has basic capability to understand emotion. 
• Eg. If someone’s dropping F-bombs, customer service application knows, “They’re probably angry or from New York”
• Systems have to have ability to be available as needed, convenient, not in the way
• Enterprise has specific verticalized applications of these technologies:
  • ie. Healthcare: Voice to text, translation from Dr. prose into medical code in real-time
• Nuance created speech-based interactive audio ads, but need sensors to contextualize settings

Carey Bran: Plantronics is focused on letting developers integrate into their audio devices, which can be fed into speech recognition technologies; enabling technologies and integrating more and more sensors to enable easier, more intuitive experiences.

• Future is being able to walk into a sensory environment and having it sense who you are and morph around you.
• Durable, rugged devices can be designed for enterprise/call center applications, but consumers want sleekness
• Devices must be able to morph between consumer and work phones

Kirsten Bay:  As sentiments move into digital, sentiment is lost. The future is being able to reintegrate sentiment into digital.

• Customer satisfaction on Twitter is much better than on phones. Customer service agents are more highly trained and valued than phone representatives.
• Enterprises use sentiment in communications with call centers, social media to design their products.