Oracle Adds Nuance Speech Recognition to Its Mobile Apps
Oracle has selected Nuance Communications' voice and language offerings for a broad set of its mobile apps. Under a worldwide, multiyear agreement, Oracle will use Nuance Cloud Services to add speech recognition and synthesis to certain mobile apps.
The apps support Oracle applications for enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, customer relationship management, and human capital management, in addition to Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud Service, Oracle RightNow Cloud Service, and Oracle Taleo Cloud Service, among others.
"Oracle is aggressively organizing its cloud-based resources into a coherent platform for a wide spectrum of business functions," says Dan Miller, senior analyst at Opus Research. "Nuance's cloud-based speech and language processing offerings support a conversational front end that will serve as an intelligent assistant that can give a consistent experience to individuals trying to reach an enterprise over the phone or through its Web site."
Nuance said that despite significant advancements in mobile application design, a gap between desktop and mobile productivity often remains. The company said that it envisions a workplace in which employees will be able to utilize state-of-the-art voice and language understanding capabilities to access and use enterprise applications in mobile environments—providing the same or even better efficiency as through their desktops. By leveraging voice technologies, Nuance said that it believes it can significantly cut employee learning curves and improve productivity for mobile users.
"Smartphones and tablets are quickly becoming the leading devices for interacting with enterprise applications, and Oracle has led the way through our broad set of mobile apps," said Alan Fothergill, vice president of Oracle Applications Development, in a statement. "Working with Nuance, we are also leading the way in using speech interfaces to make it easier and more natural to interact with enterprise solutions."