noHold Announces SICURA® Voice to Add Speech Recognition Capabilities to its AI Platform

October 31, 2018, MILPITAS, CA – Previously, noHold announced its ability to provide voice for its Virtual Assistants through Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant. Now, noHold is excited to be able to provide its customers with voice recognition and speech synthesis straight from its platform, SICURA.

Integrating SICURA with smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home has been a great first step toward providing voice to our Virtual Assistants, but in some cases our customers want complete control of the customer experience, so we created SICURA Voice. This new component includes:

• Speech Recognition
• Speech Synthesis
• Multiple language support

The Speech Recognition is speaker independent, meaning that it can work with multiple users without training. It is also continuous meaning that it understands free speech, not just simple one or two word commands. It currently supports thirteen languages, ten are European and three are double-byte (Chinese, Japanese and Russian).

Our customers can now create their own voice enabled Virtual Assistant without the need of publishing it on a specific platform, or using a specific invocation phrase.

“noHold has been in the conversational interfaces space for almost two decades. Adding voice to our NLP and NLU solutions is a natural progression that helps us augment our customers’ capabilities,” said Diego Ventura, CEO of noHold, Inc.

About noHold, Inc.

noHold is a privately held company established in 1999 and is headquartered in Milpitas, CA, USA (Silicon Valley). noHold is the acknowledged leader in Web based Self-service solutions with a mission to deliver real answers to real questions – real fast. Simple to use, easy to implement and as close to human as you can get, noHold turns automated customer support into cognitive customer interactions. noHold customers include Cisco, Dell, McAfee and a host of industry leaders. More information can be found at http://www.nohold.com.

noHold Connects its own Albert with Amazon’s Alexa

March 30, 2017, MILPITAS, CA – noHold is excited to announce the availability of a connector that can link SICURA™ QuickStart to Amazon’s Alexa. QuickStart empowers non-programmers to create a bot (Albert) from any existing documents such as, product manuals, employee manuals, training documents, etc. Through the connector Albert can now easily turn a document into an Alexa skill. For example, say you want to extend Alexa to answer questions about your home. Today, to be able to achieve this goal, you would have to be a programmer, or at least very technically savvy. With Albert this is no longer the case. All you have to do is:

1. Create a document that contains FAQ’s about your home (i.e. where is the main valve for the water? Where is the electrical panel?)
2. Use QuickStart to create an Albert by ingesting the document
3. Use the connector to link Albert to Alexa

From that moment on, you can say, “Alexa, ask Albert where the water valve is?” and Alexa will answer back from the knowledge she obtains from Albert. This can be a pretty useful system, especially if your guests are accidentally flooding your home. 

Other use cases involve creating an Albert/Alexa combination that can answer questions in the boardroom, at a hotel concierge, in a company lobby, at the post office, in a classroom, etc. The possibilities are endless.

The next step is to take the connector from the lab and make it available to everybody with the click of a button. Diego Ventura, CEO and Founder of noHold said, “I am looking forward to the day when everybody with a QuickStart account and an Amazon Echo will be able to expand Alexa’s capabilities in minutes without having to be a programmer. With a bit of luck, that moment is around the corner.”