Virtual Assistants Receive a Work Promotion with Nuiku
Seattle, Washington (PRWEB) September 18, 2013 -- Nuiku, the virtual assistant technology that lets professionals do their jobs via their mobile phones, today announced the official launch of the company and closing of a $1.6M seed funding round. By combining Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, Nuiku is creating apps that understand voice, connect to backend systems of record and constantly learn and analyze. Only Nuiku’s NLP engine understands the words professionals use and has the ability to translate those words into meaningful actions.
Nuiku got its start back in June of 2012. As a seasoned sales person always on the go, Nuiku Chief Executive Officer Sean Thompson was constantly frustrated by the poor user-experience of line-of-business systems (CRM, ERP, et al) and also found these systems were typically even harder to manage on the mobile phone. The resulting vision of Thompson and Chief Technology Officer Bill Baker—a Distinguished Engineer and former lead on Microsoft’s SQL Server Database—is to deploy every professional with a role-specific virtual assistant. Nuiku’s first application will be a virtual assistant for sales, with an expected launch date in Q4 2013. Today, Nuiku for Sales is in beta and has more than 25 companies testing the product.
“Nuiku’s name and vision are rooted in the belief that Natural User Interface is the way of the future whereby end-users use voice and touch to do their job. Current virtual assistants and NLP technologies, like Siri, are great for simple actions such as getting directions to the nearest coffee shop, but they cannot keep up with the demands of today’s working professionals,” said Thompson. “Nuiku will change the way people do business in today’s increasingly mobile and on demand world.”
Starting with a role-specific language and data model that informs the natural language intent engine, Nuiku interprets what users want when they talk or type updates or questions. Then, it applies a patent pending integration engine to connect to the back-end systems of record that the professional is responsible to update. Finally, through an AI engine, Nuiku analyzes and learns based on the data it is connected to and processes. This enables Nuiku to prompt, remind, suggest actions the users should take to optimize their role. In other words, Nuiku is constantly thinking on behalf of the user.
"Nuiku's role specific virtual assistant is likely to become the job-assist killer app for mobile devices," said Brent Frei, Chairman of Smartsheet and former founder of CRM company Onyx. "Nuiku is solving hard technical problems to make mobile more strategic for the enterprise, and is being led by heavy hitters with a history in big solutions success.”
Companies or sales professionals interested in participating in the final phase of BETA testing of Nuiku for Sales should visit http://www.nuiku.com and sign up for beta. Those interested in testing future Nuiku virtual assistants for finance, marketing, service, or other vertical are also welcome to contact Nuiku to be added to the waiting list. For more information, please visit http://www.nuiku.com and sign up for the newsletter.
About Nuiku
Nuiku is a virtual assistant technology that lets professionals do their jobs via their mobile phones. By combining Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, Nuiku is creating apps that understand voice, connect to backend systems of record and constantly learn and analyze. While other virtual assistants can retrieve directions to the nearest coffee shop, they are limited to these types of simplistic responses. Only Nuiku’s NLP engine understands the words professionals use and has the ability to translate those words into meaningful actions. Find Nuiku in the iPhone app store or visit http://www.nuiku.com.
Andrea Vuturo Hawley, +1 (415) 796-2817, [email protected]
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