Nuance Communications Launches Technical Certification Program
Nuance Communications is offering a new technical certification program through Nuance Speech University.
The program enables Nuance partners to deliver and support enterprise solutions that leverage the company’s core products.
According to Deanne Harper, manager of Nuance Speech University, the certification program will support the company’s partners by providing up to date information on Nuance products as they evolve. She also notes that many of the company’s partners had wanted some sort of certification program.
“The program in and of itself is certainly intended to help support a lot of the new versions of our products released in the last few years,” Harper says. “We wanted to make sure that we really had a mechanism for evaluating expertise and maintaining and really supporting the expertise so everybody was getting all they needed and wanted from the product line.”
Nuance recently held its first certification exam, awarding certifications to employees at Avaya, Genesys, Intervoice/Convergys, Holly Connects, and SwampFox.
“The reaction of anybody who is certified or anybody who is working with the products—all those kinds of people are very thrilled to have—once again—certification as [an indicator] of competency and a high degree of reliability and a real differentiator in the marketplace,” Harper says.
Noting that the initiative is still very new, Harper expects to receive additional feedback in the near future and cites hundreds—if not thousands—of partners around the world that could take advantage of the program.
“This is a global program,” she says. “There are certainly several hundred that will be eligible for this program and most everyone we talked to so far actually embraced the whole idea.”
According to Nuance, certification through the program provides the opportunity to increase skills in the areas of installing, configuring, testing, and troubleshooting Nuance enterprise products.
The curriculum for obtaining certification includes courses in the installation, configuration, and basic troubleshooting of Nuance Recognizer Version 9, Nuance Speech Server, RealSpeak, and the license manager. Additionally offered is instruction on first level support for Nuance Recognizer Version 9, Nuance Speech Server, and RealSpeak.
Harper says the program—which currently covers “enterprise foundation technologies”—will soon be expanding.
“We plan to have a next generation,” she says. “There are multiple rings of other products that circle around these. There are products that stand alone from these. And effectively our plan is to take this initial plunge into creating this whole program and to expand it into all sorts of areas.”
“We want to make sure that everyone has the knowledge they need and that they stay current because this is a very dynamic industry,” Harper adds. “Things are changing very quickly.”