Time has past and both companies have deemed the core technology to be ready for formal introduction through the spin-off. Both SRI and BBVA have assigned intellectual property to the venture and are shareholders. Zor Gorelov, founder and former CEO of the cloud-based automated contact center maker SpeechCycle, is the CEO. He tells me that the firm has entered the market ready to take on the major pain points of every financial institutions mobile strategy: “A better UX, Rich in features, easy to discover, easy to navigate.”

As Gorelov observes, both Apple and Google are addressing these issues for mobile devices. However, in his words, in enterprise settings,” simple Q&A will not be enough.” Intelligent Agents must be “conversational.” Gorelov goes on to describe Kasisto’s core concept as “Conversation as a Service.” It includes support of a white label mobile assistant, designed to support mobile banking on a smartphone or tablet by embedding a “floating microphone” on the user’s screen. Just as important, it is designed to enable personnel in the banks’ IT departments to leverage skills and infrastructure elements that are already familiar to them, like Java, HTML5 and XHTML. Kasisto also offers access to the platform through RESTful interfaces and APIs.

Kasisto enters the market offering a “comprehensive technology stack including speech recognition, natural language understanding and generation, and artificial intelligence reasoning.” In effect, it recognizes the intent of the banking customer. It does not attempt to replace existing capabilities of a banks’ online or mobile offerings. Instead it aims to make them “richer” by adding the ability to such things as keep track of context and “normalize” results in  order to provide the best answer in the context of a human-like interaction. As an example, when a banking customer asks the assistant to display “all $4 transactions over the past month,” he or she will be shown those that fall within a reasonable range: $3.95…$4.20… etc. (The cost of a latte plus tax in various locales).

The user interface is multi-modal, meaning  that it lets bank customers access information and perform simple or complex tasks using their voice or keyboards on smart devices. As SRI Venture’s Norman Winarsky explains, “Virtual personal assistant technology has revolutionized consumer interaction with mobile devices…. Now consumers expect a more human-like experience when interacting online. Kasisto represents a new user experience—one that is context aware, personalized, and more effective.”

Winarsky will be one of the featured speakers at Opus Research’s Intelligent Assistants Conference, which will convene in San Francisco on September 16, 2004.