Michael Steinmann is the Director of Regional Technology at Nuance Communications.
Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) is the pioneer and leader in conversational artificial intelligence (AI) innovations. With decades of domain and artificial intelligence expertise, Nuance works with thousands of organizations, employing around 10,001 professionals. The company has a revenue of around 1.931 billion USD.
Nuance was founded in 1992 and merged with its competitor in the commercial large-scale speech application business, ScanSoft, in October 2005. Nuance is also one of the major forces behind the creation of Siri, Apple’s voice assistant.
Michael has been working with Nuance Communications since 2007 and had been the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), before becoming a Director. At Nuance, Michael’s major focus right now is to help the largest regional customers better understand and utilise the suite of Biometric Authentication and Artificial Intelligence technologies that they offer.
Before joining Nuance, Michael worked as the General Manager at Telstra. He had also held senior technology positions worldwide at organisations, including Genesys, Informix, Ingres, Sun, and AT&T.
In this episode, Michael shares with us some of the cutting-edge advancements in the worlds of natural language processing (NLP), enterprise speech recognition technologies, and cybersecurity.
Here are the highlights:
- A fascinating patent that Michael holds for a call centre and advanced customer support technology.
- The history and development of virtual agents using NLP.
- How technology has developed and improved the quality of human-machine interactions over the years.
- The fascinating world of voice recognition technologies from Nuance Communications in seven billion devices.
- How Nuance helped supply the technology to build Siri.
- How the quality of the text-to-speech tools has also improved and how it has been used.
- Role of data science in all this – it’s all about the linguistic data you have.
- The transition from statistical models to neural networks in speech recognition.
- How computers understand the intricacies of language
- How the domain-specific microservices are making life easier for business owners.
- Benefits of voice biometric security methods.
- Using voice behavioural and biometric signals, and speech patterns to detect fraudsters.
- Flaws and dangers of the prevalent security methods.
- How to make sure that your security measures don’t impact the customer experience.
- Why it all comes down to simplifying communications among teams and with customers.
If you are the CEO or CTO who wants to be updated about the latest developments in customer experience and cybersecurity this is the episode for you!
More links about the guest
LinkedIn:
What is one book that he would gift to his younger self:
- The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks
- https://www.pearson.com.au/9780201835953
Articles:
- https://www.businesschief.asia/leadership-and-strategy/why-its-time-companies-stop-using-pins-and-passwords
- https://powerretail.com.au/insights/2015-innovative-service-offering/
In the News:
- https://www.itwire.com/security/voice-biometrics-detects-98-of-fraudulent-calls.html
- https://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/computer-says-yes-the-digital-job-for-talkers-not-techies-20190815-p52hey.html
- https://fst.net.au/speaker/michael-steinmann/
Patents:
- https://patents.justia.com/inventor/michael-steinmann
- https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140146959A1/en
Further Reading
- https://www.biocatch.com/blog/what-is-behavioral-biometrics
- https://www.nuance.com/en-au/omni-channel-customer-engagement/security/identification-and-verification.html
- https://www.nuance.com/en-au/omni-channel-customer-engagement/nuance-mix.html
- https://whatsnext.nuance.com/en-au/
- https://www.nuance.com/en-au/omni-channel-customer-engagement/security/nuance-gatekeeper.html