Nuance just opened their NLU platform as a beta to developers https://developer.nuance.com/public/index.php?task=mix.
It is more than simply NLU but a full stack including speech recognition that can be used in own applications as shown in their promotion video.
Similar to efforts of NLU startups residing under .ai, Nuance Mix is able to detect an intent and user defined entities from entered sentences. The possibility to also employ Nuance ASR, however, makes it more complete than those efforts. Maybe, this has to be seen as an attempt to strenghten Nuance approach to a virtual assistant that they call Nina. Nina has been out for a while but did not receive much attention so far.
The market of virtual assistants is already somewhat populated. Google Now and Apple's Siri are well known and established. Others, like Microsoft's Cortana also try to gain attraction. Recently, Microsoft opened Project Oxford as a cloud - based tool for the creation of smart (voice centric) applications. A comparable, but maybe more advanced offer is IBM Watson which is available for some time. Another one is Amazon Echo that also opened their platform to developers.
It appears that spoken language technology is mature enough to be really useful. Good news for developers who want to play around with voice interaction to control applications in the internet of things. Currently, there is a plethora of SDKs available that can be used for free. The current question is not if we will see more spoken interaction with everyday things in our lives, but who will win the race for a sufficient number of users and their data. Maybe, Nuance is already too late with Nuance Mix to enter that market. Maybe, they can step in nevertheless, relying on their year-long dominance in speech recognition
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