Lei Fengnet (search "Lei Feng Net" public concern) in the last article "the world's largest speech recognition company Nuance's floating history (on) decline" mentioned that Nuance once stood in the top of the food chain of science and technology experienced a storm, More and more, if we continue to rely on basic technology, it is almost a dead end.
At this point, Nuance has only one alternative: transition.
 Force the consumer marketIn view of Siri's success, Nuance naturally has his eyes on 2C products, so he has launched voice assistants like DragonGo, Wintermute, Dragon Assistant and many other voice assistant applications. However, at the time, the voice assistant market was already a Red Sea. Daniel Gross, founder of Cue, said The situation to the smart assistant market is quite difficult and full of unknown. Nuance is also not smooth on the C-end product. It is disadvantaged in these three areas :
Lack of consumer-grade product genes: Nuance provides basic voice technology services for enterprises, and is far away from users. There is a certain gap between grasping common user needs and Apple and Google.
Lack of ecological chain support: Siri and Google Now are built directly into the iPhone and Nexus phones, and are paired with their own apps.
Users' acceptance of voice assistants is not high: On the one hand, users are more accustomed to touch interactions, and secondly voice assistants are not smart. The intelligence of the C-side question answering system often depends on the amount of data the user generates in the life scene and the cloud computing capabilities. Nuance is obviously weak in this respect.
Seeing Nuance's C-end product is about to fetch water from the bamboo basket, in order to rise, it is necessary to continue to deepen the cultivation of its own B-side market for many years.
 Enterprise Solution ProviderNuance's advantage over Apple and Google lies in its experience in serving the B-end customer base. After 2012, the company gradually began to transform itself from the underlying technology exporter to an enterprise solution provider. Nuance established four business units:
The Medical Business Department provides medical record management and handbook transcription services.
The Enterprise Business Unit provides customer service and call center applications for the banking or telecommunications industries.
The Mobile Devices Business Unit provides command and control functions, voice search and SMS applications in mobile phones and automotive equipment.
The Image Business Unit provides MFP multi-function scanning, PDF, and document automation solutions.
Medical Solutions
Among the four business units, the most income is the medical business department. The business of the department is to provide voice navigation file systems and applications for clinical professionals. Nuance's medical applications can be integrated with other companies' physicians' records files to realize patients. The completeness of electronic medical record records in different clinical systems, different medical platforms, and out-of-hospital hospitals effectively improves doctors' diagnostic efficiency. According to statistics, doctors use Nuance's clinical speech recognition technology products to record nearly 100 million patient data each year, of which 94% of medical institutions are considering or have a strong interest in using clinical speech recognition technology.
The medical business allowed him to find a new source of sustained hematopoiesis. In addition, telecom operators and banks are also key customers of Nuance.
Call Center Solution
An important product of the enterprise business department is the Nuance Recognizer (call center self-service solution). The vast majority of telecom operators and banks in the world use this call center solution. Nuance voice solutions automatically handle more than 12 billion calls per year. Inbound interactive services. With the rise of artificial intelligence customer service, Nuance is also deploying related businesses such as TouchCommerce to fully deploy this business and further realize the unmanned call center.
Mobile application products
In addition to enterprise-grade heavy-duty products, Nuance also introduced more common voice-to-text and input method software. In addition, Nina Virtual Assistant, Conversational IVR (ignoring voice response), hosting platform and other solutions are also provided for customer service. Although voice assistants are at a disadvantage in competition, customer resources in the hands can not be ignored. Nuance almost monopolized the car audio software market of major international car brands before 2013, including BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, etc., with about 30 million vehicles installed. Have their car voice assistant Dragon Drive.
Voiceprint technology
While expanding its business, Nuance still remembers its essence: voice technology. In recent years, Nuance has developed the latest voiceprint technology. We know that each person's fingerprint is unique, and similarly , voiceprint is also a person's personality characteristics . Record and authenticate user identities based on the person's voice characteristics . The technology's floor-to-ceiling application allows customers to tailor telephone customer service solutions to verify the identity of legitimate callers by analyzing voice content during natural conversations between callers and agents and detect known fraudsters in real time. Increased the security of all its voice products.
 Reference for Chinese companiesNuance has gradually integrated its technology into services and processes after several twists and turns and has independently developed industry solutions to provide customers with powerful product support. Today, thousands of companies in industries such as healthcare, telecommunications, finance, and mobile applications are able to use the multidimensional services that Nuance products bring through natural language interactions. Nuance also serves as a reference for many voice technology companies in the transition phase.
Domestic HKUST News also encountered the same problems as Nuance: The gross margin obtained by simply providing technology is far lower than that of providing services. Underlying technology providers are often vulnerable to giant price wars and free-form strangling. This phenomenon is also reflected in the competition in the cloud computing market. BAT competes in the Iaas field of cloud computing, making it difficult for other vendors to enter, and the Saas application layer clearly has a broader profit and living space. Therefore, HKUST provides low-level technical services for some companies, and provides deeper application services in the three branches of human-computer interaction (such as mobile phones, automobiles, televisions, call centers), children's education, and national information security communications.
 A new round of opportunities and challenges After the transition, Nuance was in a good state of operation, but this time faced a new round of challenges.
According to the latest smart voice market share statistics, Nuance’s revenue has increased compared to the past, but its market share has dropped from 60% in 2014 to 31%. It can be seen that the smart voice market is in a period of rapid growth, while competition is also unprecedentedly increased, and opportunities and challenges coexist. In addition, a large number of "outsiders" also joined the competition, Amazon has acquired Yap, Evi, IvonaSoftware and other voice companies, Facebook also in one fell swoop to MobileTechnologies, Wit.ai into their hands, both in this year The launch of projects such as Echo and Facebook M is intended to take a bite out of the voice market.
Judging from current trends, the interactive system of robots will become an important competition for voice companies. The advantage of Google and Apple lies in the user's life data, so they are dominant in the game of consumer robot interactive systems. Nuance, with its many years of experience in banking, medical, and automotive industries, has a vertical trump card. This hole may be the first to establish Nuance's insurmountable obstacles in the future battle of enterprise-level robot interaction systems.
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