Virtusa and Xtone partner to bring Voice Assistant soln to enterprise mobile apps

BANGALORE, INDIA: Virtusa Corporation, a global business consulting and IT outsourcing company that combines innovation, technology leadership and industry solutions to transform the customer experience, and Xtone, provider of the Xavi Platform for Voice Assistants, today announced a partnership to enhance the user experience for mobile enterprise apps with the power of natural language understanding and conversational interfaces.

The companies will jointly offer a broad range of Voice Assistant solutions from simple voice extensions to existing mobile apps to comprehensive conversational interfaces that are seamlessly integrated with enterprise contact centers.

"Now that mobile users are adopting speech-driven personal assistants like Apple's Siriand Google Now, the race is on for enterprises to offer engaging natural language interfaces for their apps in finance, insurance, travel and other industries that serve users on the go," said Frank Palermo, senior vice president, Global Technical Solutions Group, Virtusa. "With the Virtusa/Xtone solution, innovative enterprises can differentiate their mobile apps with an engaging conversational experience that will establish industry leadership, build brand loyalty and ultimately reduce customer care costs."

The Virtusa/Xtone Voice Assistant solution is based on Xtone's patented XaviTM platform, which offers a write-once/run-anywhere development and deployment environment that supports both iOS and Android devices. With its distributed architecture and XML language and tools, Xavi enables developers to implement voice assistants as independent hands-free/eyes-free apps or tightly integrated with an existing mobile interface, giving users a rich, mixed-modal experience that supports any combination of speech and tap control.

"Xavi is the first platform that is built with a mobile developer in mind. We provide a feature set that enables mobile developers to focus on voice driven use cases and experiences with the confidence that the underlying XaviTM platform will handle the implementation specifics," said Vishal Dhawan, CTO of Xtone. "The technical strengths of the Xavi platform combined with the innovation-driven solution development capabilities of Virtusa will help us meet the demand and, together, we will build apps for our clients that are enjoyable for the user and more productive for the enterprise."

Virtusa and Xtone offer a variety of mobility implementation services including UI design, application development and integration, speech tuning, testing, deployment and ongoing managed services. Virtusa also offers Mobile Voice Assistants as part of its Mobility Proof-of-Concept Factory model, which enables clients to test and validate mobile solutions in Virtusa's Innovation Lab prior to full-scale deployment.