Well-known voice technology company Nuance Communications recently announced a new voice platform - `Nina' - which will boast a Siri-like voice-control interface, and will essentially bring about an improvement in customer-services apps on mobile devices.

Announcing the new `Nina' voice platform, Nuance - the company behind the Dragon Naturally Speaking lineup of voice applications for PCs and Dragon Dictation on the Apple iPhone - said that `Nina' is a "virtual assistant for mobile customer service apps," which is now available as an SDK for the Android as well as the Apple developers for incorporation into their devices.

In its statement pertaining to the `Nina' voice-recognition mobile assistant, Nuance said that the new voice platform will basically combine the company's speech recognition with text-to-speech, natural language understanding, and voice biometrics. As such, the `Nina' will be the first voice-recognition app to place equal emphasis on understanding the speaker and on what is actually being said.

Despite the fact that `Nina' works in a manner that is fairly akin to other voice-recognition apps and needs a network connection to function, it actually dials up to the cloud so as to parse what the speaker is saying to it.

Terming `Nina' as "a watershed innovation for the automated customer service industry," Robert Weideman - Executive VP of Nuance Enterprise Division - said in a statement that `Nina', along with bringing the virtual assistant directly into an app, "raises the bar through its level of interactive dialog and language understanding."