Nuance Communications, Inc. provides conversational and cognitive artificial intelligence (AI) innovations that bring intelligence to everyday work and life.
The company delivers intuitive solutions that understand, analyze, and respond to people - amplifying their ability to help others with increased productivity and security. It works with thousands of organizations globally across healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, government, and retail - to create stronger relationships a...
Nuance Communications, Inc. provides conversational and cognitive artificial intelligence (AI) innovations that bring intelligence to everyday work and life.
The company delivers intuitive solutions that understand, analyze, and respond to people - amplifying their ability to help others with increased productivity and security. It works with thousands of organizations globally across healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, government, and retail - to create stronger relationships and better experiences for their customers and workforce.
The company offers its customers a wide range of products and services, including clinical documentation, solutions for clinicians, radiologists and care teams, as well as intelligent customer engagement and security and biometric solutions for leading brands. In addition, its solutions utilize its innovations in AI, including cognitive sciences and machine learning to create smarter, more natural experiences with technology.
The company markets and sells its solutions and technologies around the world directly through a dedicated sales force and a global network of resellers, including system integrators, independent software vendors, value-added resellers, distributors, hardware vendors, telecommunications carriers and e-commerce websites.
The company has approximately 1,700 language scientists, developers, and engineers dedicated to continually refining its technologies and advancing its portfolio to meet its customers’ diverse and changing needs. As of September 30, 2021, the company had operations and a sales force in 27 countries.
The company offers its solutions and technologies to its customers in a variety of ways, including via hosted cloud-based solutions, perpetual and term software licenses, implementation and custom solution development services and maintenance and support.
Segments
The company operates through three segments: Healthcare, Enterprise, and Other.
Healthcare segment
This segment provides intelligent systems that support a more natural and insightful approach to clinical documentation, freeing clinicians to spend more time caring for patients. The company’s Healthcare solutions capture, improve, and communicate more than 300 million patient stories each year, helping more than 550,000 clinicians in 10,000 global healthcare organizations to drive meaningful clinical and financial outcomes. The company’s clinical speech recognition, medical transcription, clinical documentation improvement (CDI), coding, quality, and medical imaging solutions provide a more complete and accurate view of patient care.
The company’s principal solutions for the Healthcare segment include the following:
Dragon Medical One (DMO)
The company’s cloud-based speech solution provides a consistent and personalized clinical documentation experience across solutions, platforms, and devices, regardless of physical location. DMO allows clinicians to use their voice to securely capture the patient story and control applications more naturally and efficiently - anywhere, anytime. DMO is HITRUST CSF-certified and uses a secure desktop app to keep data private and protected. It helps increase productivity and offers more flexibility and personalization while establishing a firm foundation for organizations to take advantage of new and future innovations, including virtual assistants and ambient clinical intelligence (ACI).
Computer-Assisted Physician Documentation (CAPD)
Powered by AI, the company’s solutions give physicians in-workflow guidance to drive better outcomes across the continuum of care. The company’s CAPD solutions apply workflow and knowledge automation, proven clinical strategies and point-of-care advice to capture complete and accurate documentation while improving productivity and satisfaction. The company makes it easier to add specificity to existing diagnoses, discover evidence of undocumented diagnoses and support various specialties and care settings, including inpatient, outpatient, emergency medicine, surgical, and cardiovascular.
Diagnostic Imaging Solutions
The company’s diagnostic imaging solutions improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the radiologists’ work to improve clinical and financial outcomes across the continuum of care. Using AI, the company helps automate time-consuming, non-value-added tasks, freeing radiologists to perform more important tasks. By focusing more on integrating patients’ clinical and imaging information and collaborating better with peers, it helps radiologists uplift their role within the care team. The company’s industry-leading solutions for radiology deliver real-time intelligence in the workflow and include PowerScribe, which is used for 80% of radiology reports in the U.S.; and PowerShare, which offers an image sharing network with more than 10,000 connected healthcare facilities. The company’s PowerScribe One cloud-based platform supports workflow orchestration, communication, incidental findings follow-up management, and works with its AI Marketplace for the company’s diagnostic imaging solutions.
Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX)
The Nuance DAX solution is a comprehensive, AI-powered, voice-enabled solution that uses ambient sensing technology to securely listen to clinician-patient encounter conversations while offering workflow and knowledge automation to complement the electronic healthcare record (HER). Exceeding the capabilities of a virtual or on-site scribe, Nuance DAX promotes a better patient experience by accurately capturing and appropriately contextualizing every word of the patient encounter and automatically documenting patient care without taking the physician's attention off the patient. The Nuance DAX solution is built on Microsoft Azure, a highly secure HITRUST CSF certified platform, compliant with the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, and that has implemented the physical, technical, and administrative safeguards required by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).
Clinical Documentation Improvement and Coding
The company’s comprehensive portfolio of cloud-based technologies is designed to help increase the productivity and effectiveness of CDI teams. The company’s clinically focused program and services deliver documentation guidance, AI-powered encounter prioritization, workflow management, denials support and analytics to drive better documentation across the care continuum. Designed with scale and reliability in mind, these solutions require lower installation, deployment and maintenance costs and are hosted on Microsoft Azure, a HITRUST CSF-certified infrastructure to support privacy, security and compliance.
The company provides real-time insights that promote a performance-driven program, allow peer comparisons and identify opportunities for improvement. The company’s Coding solutions offer cloud-based, enterprise-wide products and services that are designed to improve coder productivity and maintain the highest levels of accuracy and compliance. These solutions manage and monitor the types of compliance coding challenges that can put a health system at risk for delayed and reduced reimbursement. The company helps manage the workflow by bringing together the tools needed to provide better visibility into key coding performance indicators. Coder productivity can be enhanced by enabling a more complete and accurate review of both inpatient and outpatient encounters that are associated with facility and professional service fees.
The channels for distribution in the Healthcare segment utilize the company’s direct sales force to address the market and its professional services organization to support the implementation requirements of the healthcare industry. Direct distribution is supplemented by distributors, resellers, and partnerships with a variety of healthcare IT providers.
Areas of expansion and focus for the company’s Healthcare segment include innovation in AI and development of deeply verticalized and specialized intelligence to integrate with and further enhance its existing products; expansion of Nuance DAX, which takes advantage of the company’s cloud-based speech recognition technology and benefits from increasing levels of workflow, task, and knowledge automation; investment in its cloud-based offerings, operations, and network security; entering new and adjacent markets, such as ambulatory care; and expanding the company’s international capabilities.
Enterprise segment
This segment is a leading provider of AI-powered intelligent customer engagement solutions and services, which enable enterprises and contact centers to enhance and automate customer service and sales engagement.
The company’s market-leading Intelligent Engagement platform powered by conversational AI has been recognized and awarded by independent industry research firms like Forrester, Gartner and Opus. The company is also differentiated by its ability to enable enterprises to implement voice and text-based virtual assistants and to provide automated service and sales engagement across voice and digital channels, as well as the ability of the company’s solutions to seamlessly transition to agent-assisted engagement to complete a customer service request. The company’s intelligent self-service solutions are highly secure, predictive, and accurate, resulting in increased customer acquisition and satisfaction.
The company’s solutions and services portfolio spans voice, behavioral and conversational biometrics, digital virtual assistant capabilities, across voice, mobile, web and messaging channels, with inbound and outbound customer service and engagement in over 85 languages for voice, text, dialog and natural language understanding (NLU). The company’s Enterprise segment utilizes a hybrid go-to-market model, selling both direct and through reseller partners.
The company’s principal solutions for the Enterprise segment include the following:
Intelligent Engagement Solutions
The company’s open, modular cloud platform provides enterprises with the ability to implement virtual- and live-engagement across nearly all digital voice and text channels. The platform supports virtual assistant, live engagement and proactive notification services, using its conversational AI, engagement AI and security AI capabilities. The company’s Intelligent Engagement cloud is sold both directly and through partners and largely in multi-year agreements with volume-based transactional pricing and associated professional services.
Conversational AI
Nuance Mix is the company’s open, enterprise-grade SaaS rapid application development suite that is used to create advanced conversational experiences that power virtual assistants and IVR (interactive voice response) systems, using its industry-leading and cloud-agnostic conversational AI. As global organizations increasingly look to integrate Conversational AI into their digital and voice customer engagements, the ability to build a conversational experience once and deploy it across nearly any channel and modality has become critical. Nuance Mix also allows these organizations to build, maintain and deliver the complex enterprise-grade conversational experiences that help brands provide automated customer service, acquire customers and increase sales.
The company’s Conversational AI solutions are integrated with IVR systems provided to the customer by the company or by a wide range of third-party IVR and contact center vendors, who often resell its Conversational AI solutions. The company’s solutions in this category include automated speech recognition (ASR), TTS, NLU and dialog engines. The company also offers a cloud hosted IVR and voice automation platform, which is largely sold direct through multi-year agreements with volume-based transactional pricing and associated professional services.
Engagement AI
The company’s digital solutions include intelligent virtual assistants, agent AI and live engagement capabilities. This enables companies to engage with their customers on any voice and digital channel, with high levels of automated customer self-service – and should an agent be needed – using agent AI to reduce agent handle time. The company’s solutions support a design-once, deploy many approach, allowing companies to deliver the same or similar customer experience across any voice and digital channel, including IVR/phone, web, mobile apps and messaging systems, including SMS text messaging, and messaging systems and apps, such as Apple Business Chat and Google Business Messages, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. The company’s Engagement AI solutions also enable contact center agents to be more productive by giving them easier access to information with relevant, real-time insights, visibility into active conversations, and proactive recommendations to improve the customer and agent experience.
Security AI
These solutions enable organizations to automate the identification and verification of their customers while preventing fraud in digital and voice channels. Nuance Gatekeeper is the company’s cloud-native biometric security platform that combines industry-leading voice and behavioral conversational biometrics with intelligent detectors and an underlying risk engine to authenticate customers, identify fraudsters, and detect cases of potential fraud – quickly and accurately. The company licenses its on-premise solutions via term license, and occasionally via perpetual license plus maintenance and support (M&S). The company licenses its cloud solutions via transactional and/or annual volume agreements, frequently with multi-year commitments.
Areas of focus and expansion for the company’s Enterprise segment include increasing the penetration of its full portfolio into the company’s large existing customer base; bringing its Intelligent Engagement cloud to new customers, the mid-market and new international markets, especially Western Europe, Japan and Australia; expansion of its security and biometrics cloud solution; and continued investment in the company’s AI-powered solutions to ensure the company retains leadership throughout its solutions.
Other segment
This segment consists primarily of voicemail transcription services following the sale of the company’s Mobile Operator Services business in 2019 and the wind-down of its Devices business.
Strategy
The key elements of the company’s strategy include transitioning to and expansion of its Healthcare cloud-based offerings; expanding its Intelligent Engagement portfolio in Enterprise, with a focus on cloud; accelerating its innovation activities; expanding its go-to-market presence; expanding internationally; and growing through targeted acquisitions and strategic investments.
Intellectual Property
As of September 30, 2021, the company held approximately 2,020 patents and 250 patent applications.
Competition
The company’s Healthcare segment competes against Optum, Amazon, Google, 3M, and Phillips. The company’s Enterprise segment competes against [24]7, Amazon, Genesys, Google, LivePerson, Salesforce, and Pindrop, among other less frequent competitors.
History
The company was founded in 1992. It was incorporated in 1992 under the laws of the state of Delaware. The company was formerly known as Visioneer, Inc. and changed its name to ScanSoft, Inc. in 1999. Further, the company changed its name to Nuance Communications, Inc. in 2005.
