The 2015 Speech Industry Star Performers: Nexidia

Nexidia Brings Advanced Science to Analytics

Nexidia broke new ground in February when it applied neural networking to its discovery application, raising the bar on speed, accuracy, and the richness of content available through speech analytics.

Neural Phonetics Speech Analytics, now available in Nexidia Search, Nexidia's discovery application for the legal market, combines phonetic indexing, automatic transcription, and sentiment detection to help reviewers understand the context of their audio recordings. They can also see and analyze the most common themes that occur within audio files. In addition, the word-based analysis can use other textual content, such as email, transcribed depositions, and news articles, to help improve the phrase recognition output and deliver results that closely represent the content of the recordings.

So far, Nexidia has upgraded more than 75 percent of its existing customers and more than 95 percent of its new customers to the new platform.

"Nexidia's contributions in the area of phonetics-based speech analytics are second to none," says Donna Fluss, president and founder of DMG Consulting. "They have really moved forward the entire science of phonetics-based speech analytics."

Nexidia has also continued to enhance its core application, Nexidia Interaction Analytics, and its Real-Time Monitoring and Agent Assistance applications, and it launched Nexidia Compliance Management, a compliance workflow application targeted at the financial services industry. Compliance Management relies on Nexidia's patented analytics platform to provide critical insight into the unstructured audio conversations of customer service agents, brokers, and traders. Possible compliance breaches can be flagged and sent through a configurable review process to ensure that proper actions are taken.

Also new this year for Nexidia is Illuminate, a product family that encompasses Nexidia QC for quality control, Nexidia Comply for broadcast compliance, and Nexidia Align for caption alignment.

The Illuminate product family verifies captions, video description, and language in media files. The solutions can process media more than 40 times faster than real time using just a single processing core, and can run multiple files in parallel across all available cores. This capability means users can monitor more than 100 channels at a time from a single Nexidia Comply server, or screen tens of thousands of hours of media per day from a single Nexidia QC server.

Drew Lanham, senior vice president and general manager of Nexidia's Media and Entertainment Division, says that "each of the Nexidia Illuminate products eases the burden on media organizations that are now responsible for delivering media in many different versions for their various content partners. They can now automate something that could previously only be done manually, not only relieving QC and compliance operators from the tedious work of checking these aspects of the media, but also reducing costs, increasing throughput, and improving quality."

And through a partnership with Convergys, announced in the spring, Nexidia is bringing its speech analytics solutions to even more customers. The partnership combines Convergys's customer experience analytics expertise with Nexidia's speech analytics technology.

Convergys Analytics will use Nexidia's Interaction Analytics technology to allow its clients to gain access to unstructured customer feedback found in spoken conversations between contact center agents and customers. Convergys's analysts will leverage the data to uncover, explore, and recommend corrective action to resolve clients' underlying business issues affecting the customer experience.

Convergys, which offers some of its own call center technologies, does not have speech analytics in its portfolio.

For Nexidia, the partnership provides "another route to market," according to Trevor Chamberlain, vice president of channels and alliances at Nexidia.

"Every call coming into a contact center contains critical customer insight," said Mike Cholak, vice president of Convergys Analytics, in a statement. "Our partnership with Nexidia helps enrich our clients' understanding of their customers."

Other product pairings between Nexidia and Convergys might also be on the horizon. Nexidia, Chamberlain points out, will continue to evaluate solutions that it can take to market with Convergys.