SpiceJet Selects Nuance to Launch its Pepper Voice Assistant

Indian airline SpiceJet has introduced Pepper, a bilingual, artificial intelligence-powered virtual voice assistant built on the natural language understanding and call steering capabilities of Nuance Communications' Intelligent Engagement Platform.

Pepper can understand customer requests over the phone and automatically provide information and resolve queries through natural conversation in either English or Hindi.

"At SpiceJet, more and more customers are reaching out via voice channels for service, whether it's for flight enquiries, bookings or cancellations, or flight status. Recognizing this shift in consumer preferences, we created Pepper, which is built on a technology provided by Nuance that understands a customer's query and steers the conversation to provide a quick and relevant response," said Debojo Maharshi, chief marketing officer of SpiceJet, in a statement. "Now, customer satisfaction is measurably increasing. We're already looking for ways to expand Pepper's capabilities to address more customer needs and free up our human agents to provide more specific support related to our specialist service, SpiceMax."

"People want to engage brands in the same way they communicate with friends, family, and colleagues, and the voice channel is starting to be their preferred choice in India," said Tony Lorentzen, senior vice president of intelligent engagement at Nuance, in a statement. "Our AI technology enables natural conversational experience by understanding what the customer is saying, processing that intent, and providing the bridge to either a resolution or the right live person to help get to one. We are pleased to be partnering with SpiceJet for the roll out of Pepper voice bot and congratulate them for being first in their field with this kind of application."