Nexmo has long led the charge in providing you with the tools to add contextual communications to your applications. Today we announced new partnerships with a number of Artificial Intelligence leaders including Amazon, Google, IBM Watson, and Microsoft. Together with these partners, Nexmo enables rapid, agile innovation, allowing you to combine AI and communications solutions. Nexmo is uniquely positioned to enable you to integrate AI into real-time communications apps using the WebSockets feature of the Voice API.

But enough about us. What does this mean for you, the Nexmo developer community?

Here's a rundown of our newly announced partnerships along with links to sample code and docs to help you get started using them to build better, smarter software.

• Amazon Lex Conversation Bots: Amazon Lex provides advanced deep learning of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for speech-to-text conversation and Natural Language Understanding to recognize the intent of the text. Using the Nexmo Lex Connector, your applications can interact with Lex-built services via a phone call.

• Google Speech API and DialogFlow: With Nexmo, you can now use the Google speech-to-text API to perform real-time transcriptions in various languages. Using DialogFlow and Nexmo real-time communication power, you can easily create AI enabled conversational flows.

• Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Translator and Speech to Text: Combining Microsoft's translation software, Microsoft Translator, with Nexmo's native language support gives you the power to personalize customer engagement. With real-time translation in place, callers can speak with agents in their native language without having dedicated agents for all languages.

You can also now use Nexmo's WebSocket endpoint and Microsoft's speech-to-text conversion output to enable real-time transcription of customer engagements, agent monitoring and analytics, and sentiment analysis.

If you're looking for more of a pre-built AI solution, we've announced new partnerships with ISV and BOT platforms, too:

• i2x: i2x is a real-time communication coach and analyzer that incorporates company-specific data to identify best practices and coach agents automatically. With this new partnership, i2x leverages the Nexmo and its WebSocket capability to connect voice calls to their own Automatic Speech Recognition and analytics engine.

• Mulesoft: Mulesoft enables users to create workflows that derive from the customer data layer to create customized customer engagement through services, such as translation. By adding the power of Nexmo, a MuleSoft user can look up a caller ID number against a CRM entry in order to retrieve the caller's preferred language for automated real-time translation according to user preference, with no need for an IVR.

• OneReach: With the new Nexmo partnership, OneReach now enables automated appointment reminders, ecommerce order management, and financial services, such as bill pay.

• Over.ai: Over.ai is a natural language AI voice platform built to handle complex interactions between business and customers over phone lines. With exceptional conversational capabilities Over.ai enables businesses to connect with customers seamlessly in a human to human like conversation, lowering operational costs and significantly improving service levels. Using Over.ai and Nexmo, developers and enterprises can easily build inbound and outbound AI services to benefit from an effective, customized, 24/7 call center solution, all natively integrated to any telephony operation.

• VoiceBase: VoiceBase supports Nexmo's new split recording capability to allow for dual-channel recording in its agent assist solution. VoiceBase and Nexmo together can now provide optimized AI-enabled on-call and post-call monitoring and agent performance tracking ("automodeling"), improving and enriching the customer experience. For example, call centers can enable automated escalation of calls to agent supervisors if the sentiment score of a call dips below a certain threshold.

• Voicera: Voicera is the platform behind Eva, an AI-enabled enterprise virtual assistant that listens, takes notes and identifies action items and decisions in meetings. Eva sends notes after meetings for sharing and follow up. Using Nexmo with its transcription engine, Voicera is also able to create a useful visual of the discussion.

AI is making appearances in software across all industries. With Nexmo, you can leverage AI to drive value in context-aware, real-time communication. Nexmo can be the input of messaging/voice or output for Cognitive services.

The use cases vary, and the possibilities are limitless when we combine the power of Nexmo APIs with the intelligence of our AI partners; transcription services and sentiment analysis are among the most promising, but far from the only applications. We can't wait to see what you do with Nexmo and AI.