Looking for implementing a virtual assistant and considering alternatives for Nuance Mix? Find out how your business can benefit from the capabilities of Alan AI.
Choosing a conversational AI platform for your business is a big decision. With many factors in different categories to evaluate – efficiency, flexibility, ease-of-use, the pricing model – you need to keep the big picture in view.
With so many competitors out there, some companies still clearly aim only for big players like Nuance Mix. Nuance Mix is indeed a comprehensive platform to design chatbots and IVR agents – but before making a final purchasing decision, it makes sense to ensure the platform is tailored to your business, customers and specific demands.
The list of reasons to look at conversational AI competitors may be endless:
- Ease of customization
- Integration and deployment options
- Niche-specific features or missing product capabilities
- More flexible and affordable pricing models and so on
User Experience
Customer experience is undoubtedly at the top of any business’s priority list. Most conversational AI platforms, including Nuance Mix, offer virtual assistants with an interface that is detached from the application’s UI. But Alan AI takes a fundamentally different approach.
By default, human interactions are multimodal: in daily life, 80% of the time, we communicate through visuals, and the rest is verbal. Alan AI empowers this kind of interaction for application users. It enables in-app assistants to deliver a more intuitive and natural multimodal user experience. Multimodal experiences blend voice and graphical interfaces, so whenever users interact with the application through the voice channel, the in-app assistant’s responses are synchronized with the visuals your app has to offer.
Designed with a focus on the application, its structure and workflows, in-app assistants are more powerful than standalone chatbots. They are nested within and created for the specific aim, so they can easily lead users through their journeys, provide shortcuts to success and answer any questions.
Language Understanding
Technology is the cornerstone of conversational AI, so let’s look at what is going on under the hood.
In the conversational AI world, there are different assistant types. First are template-driven assistants that use a rigid tree-like conversational flow to resolve users’ queries – the type of assistants offered by Nuance Mix. Although they can be a great fit for straightforward tasks and simple queries, there are a number of drawbacks to be weighted. Template-driven assistants disregard the application context, the conversational style may sound robotic and the user experience may lack personalization.
Alan AI enables contextual conversations with assistants of a different type – AI-powered ones.
The Alan AI Platform provides developers with complete flexibility in building conversational flows with JavaScript programming and machine learning.
To gain unparalleled accuracy in the users’ speech recognition and language understanding, Alan AI leverages its patented contextual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) technology that relies on the data model and application’s non-verbal context. Owing to use of the non-verbal context, Alan AI in-app assistants are provided with awareness of what is going on in any situation and on any screen and can make dialogs dynamic, personalized and human-like.
Deployment Experience
In the deployment experience area, Alan AI is in the lead with over 45K developer signups and a total of 8.5K GitHub stars. The very first version of an in-app assistant can be designed and launched in a few days.
The scope of supported platforms, if compared to the Nuance conversational platform, is remarkable. Alan AI provides support for web frameworks (React, Angular, Vue, JS, Ember and Electron), iOS apps built with Swift and Obj-C, Android apps built with Kotlin and Java, and cross-platform solutions: Flutter, Ionic, React Native and Apache Cordova.
Understanding the challenges of the in-app assistant development process, Alan AI lightens the burden of releasing the brand-new voice functionality with:
- Conversational dialog script versioning
- Ability to publish dialog versions to different environments
- Integration with GitHub
- Support for gradual in-app assistant rollout with Alan’s cohorts
Pricing
While a balance between benefit and cost is what most businesses are looking for, the price also needs to be considered. Here, Alan AI has an advantage over Nuance Mix, offering multiple pricing options, with free plans for developers and flexible schemes for the enterprise.
Discover the conversational AI platform for your business at alan.app.