Siri is a feature present on the iPhone 4s that has definitely taken technology to a new level. For the first time, people can talk to their smart phones and receive audible responses. Nuance, the same company behind the voice recognition available on Apple's Siri, has launched its own personal assistant, Nina.
However, it is unlikely that Nina and Siri will face off because Nina serves a different purpose. The purpose of Siri is to provide iPhone users with a personal assistant to send text messages, make appointments and answer questions. Nina, on the other hand, is a personal assistant that can be integrated into businesses' apps to complete different transactions. Banks, for example, can implement Nina on their apps so customers can speak to pay bills, transfer money, and so on.
Remember how old fashioned it was to manually type your password to log onto your accounts? Just kidding, but with Nina you won't need to. Nina will enable users to simply speak their password to log in to their accounts via app. This feature is of course interesting, but not particularly innovative. However, Nuance is one step ahead of us with the implementation of voice recognition, so that only you can speak your password; no one else's voice will work.
Nina can also complete transactions much more detailed than Siri. According to Mashable, Nina was able to complete commands as complicated as "Pay the full balance on my Visa bill on August first" in a demo by Nuance representatives. Nina can also be customized far beyond Siri's capabilities. Businesses can choose from a selection of 40 different voices, as well as establish a certain "persona."
The hope for Nina is that customers will never again have to listen to the infamous, "press one for support, press two for bill pay," because she will be able to offer all of those services in a conversational style. We've all experienced a frustrating phone call to a corporate company, only to hang up and realize that we've spent the past hour talking to a robot and pressing buttons. Nina should certainly increase customer service because the technology behind her is even more complex than Siri's, and specifically designed for business.
According to Nuance, Nina is the "first mobile virtual assistant to understand what is said - and who said it."
What do you think about the rise in artificial intelligence? Will typing soon seem as outdated as a pen and paper once voice commands take center stage? Share your thoughts.