Nina Mobile allows companies to quickly add speech-based virtual assistant capabilities to existing Apple iOS and Google Android mobile apps, greatly enhancing the self-service experience for their customers. Nina combines Nuance speech recognition, Text-to-Speech (TTS), voice biometrics, and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology hosted in the cloud to deliver an interactive user experience that not only understands what is said, but also who is saying it.

With the new release, Nina now understands and speaks 38 languages, expanding Nuance's market opportunity across North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia and making it the first to support such a broad global language capability for speech recognition, TTS and voice biometrics. The new release also expands Nina's existing support for smartphones, to include enhanced support for tablets, including Apple iPad and iPad Mini, and Android tablets running Android 4.1.

"Nina was first to bring the power of the virtual assistant directly into mobile customer service apps, and the response from enterprise organizations and their customers has been amazing," said Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager for the Nuance Enterprise Division. "By 'going international' we are able to address the rapidly growing worldwide demand for Nina Mobile with those organizations that want to deliver the same rich, innovative customer self-service experience around the globe."

In a very short time, Nina has gained widespread support from leading enterprise organizations, with Nuance gaining agreements with a growing number of leading financial, insurance, telecommunications, healthcare and consumer products and services organizations in the world. USAA, the leading insurance and financial services provider to U.S. military members and their families, has publicly announced their selection of Nina, which will be included in an update to their popular mobile app in early 2013.

To see a demonstration of Nina, click here.

"Personal virtual assistants are a global phenomenon. Providing broad language coverage, with context-aware, interactive dialog and natural language understanding is something that few organizations are capable of accomplishing," explained Dan Miller, senior analyst at Opus Research. "Nuance is clearly taking a first-mover approach to growing global demand for mobile customer service options that embed a personal virtual assistant directly into a mobile app."

Nina is the first virtual assistant customer service app to incorporate both speech recognition and voice biometrics into a single integrated solution. It is also the first solution that provides an open software development kit (SDK) to support the rapid integration of virtual assistant capabilities into existing mobile applications. In addition, Nina is the first to allow organizations to brand their own virtual assistant persona, including the visual appearance and implementation of optional custom TTS voices.