USAA, long the leader in applying the principles of Intelligent Assistance to the financial services domain, is piloting a “skill’ for Amazon’s Alexa that will help its members define the future of financial services offered through voice-first metabots. Where other Alexa skills speak with the voice, mannerisms and conventions established for the Alexa persona, this skill, in the words of Assistant Vice President Darrius Jones, “is designed to better replicate the interaction members would have with a USAA service representative on the phone. Powered by Clinc AI, the USAA skill marks a defining moment for the Intelligent Assistance.

Jones and his team at USAA see the pilot helping to “open new avenues to better serve our members and create more opportunities for our member service representatives to handle more complex member needs. What we learn from this pilot will help shape how we view member service in years to come.”

For Clinc AI, it shows that persistence pays, as does its commitment to applying the results of extensive academic research to real world challenges of Conversational Commerce. Two years ago, we took note of the efforts of University of Michigan professor Jason Mars as he set up Sirius Labs, a collective, “open source” effort that took on “the challenge of providing human-like responses to utterances, text input and images across knowledge domains and at scale.”

Fast forward to a demo at last year’s Finovate conference to witness a demo of some of the fruits of the groups collective labor. Under the commercial name Clinc AI, Mars’ company has built a “full conversational user interface” for banking that is so compelling that USAA, a company that exemplifies the Gold Standard for optichannel customer care and self-service, has used it to power a highly compelling “skill” for Amazon’s Alexa. Its internal development team started working with Alexa’s tools in 2016, using the PYMNTS/Alexa Challenge as an opportunity for it to build a skill focused on it savings services.

It won the “Easiest to Explain to Mom” designation by enabling participating members to simply ask “How can I save $30?” or a similar question after invoking the USAA skill. The Clinc AI-based skill carries on in the spirit of letting members talk to USAA using their own words, but responses and much more conversational and cover a set of services far beyond savings. Queries can be as simple as balance inquiry (“How much money do I have in checking?”) to more engaged request for advice (“Do I have enough money to buy a new phone?”).

In the course of the pilot, the skill will learn new tricks because it remembers context and asks follow-up questions using complex human language. Throughout the conversations, it will infer information not explicitly specified by members and respond accordingly.

Participating members are required to enable the USAA skill and link it to their account in the Alexa app for security purposes. At that point, they will be given an option to add a voice PIN (not to be confused with voice biometrics or a voiceprint) as an additional  factor to prevent other people accessing their account through an Alexa-enabled device.

When Amazon started selling Echo devices and introduced third-party skills, Capital One took a leadership role by providing its customers with ways to use Alexa for a set of defined queries, such as “What is my checking account balance?”, “How much did I spend at Starbucks over the weekend?” or “what is the principal balance on my mortgage?” American Express launched its Alexa skill in May of this year with similar capabilities.

By putting an emphasis on human-like, conversational interactions and ensuring security with a voice PIN (which American Express also requires for use of its service based on user feedback from its pilot), USAA’s skill will be noticeably different and represents a step forward in defining the sort of user interface that will be both simple to use and trusted.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles