Bank customers may soon be using their phones to actually talk.
This summer, two major banks will announce audio virtual assistants paired with voice biometrics in their mobile apps, according to Nuance Communications.
More banks are in discussion to do the same. USAA is already up and running with Nina, Nuance’s virtual assistant, and US Bank is testing a voice assistant for some credit card customers. But combining a virtual assistant with voice biometrics is a new step, and one that may transform how users use their mobile apps.
Voice banking began with call centers in the 1970s and grew with branchless banks such as USAA and First Direct in the 1980s and ’90s. Advances in voice-recognition technology in the last few years, combined with the migration of transactions to the mobile channel, will soon allow users of some mobile banking apps to manage their accounts solely by voice.
Users with a virtual assistant such as Siri can open their banking apps with their voice, log in using their voice password, and complete transactions with the bank’s virtual assistant — all without touching the screen, except to prompt the app to accept your voice passphrase.
“We’re moving beyond speech recognition to intelligent natural language,” said Brett Beranek, solutions marketing manager for Nuance Communications. “It’s even moving beyond the smartphone to cars and TV.” Beranek said that over the last two to three years, banks have been seriously considering both voice biometric and virtual assistants, but that 2014 is the year that both are coming together.
The use case for voice is much like that for photo banking. Tapping a tiny smartphone screen is a pain point. The smartphone offers multiple input methods,and voice is the most basic of all — it is a phone, after all.
Voice also works as an authentication method. Users create passphrases, and Nuances’ software measures some 200 characteristics of the voiceprint. Some 50 banks including TD and Barclays, currently use Nuance technology for voice biometrics in their call center. Passwords, of course, are hard to remember and crackable by any hacker willing to put in the effort.
Biometrics are present in a few bank branches, such as Bridge Community Bank in Iowa, but have come under fire for presenting another attractive target to hackers. A database of fingerprints, for example, would yield valuable information to hackers — and fingerprints, unlike passwords or voice passphrases — are hard to change. Nuance does not store the entire voiceprint, but only “characteristics” of it, according to Beranek.
The security component will log the user in using a voice password, and also come up during high-risk transactions, such as transactions of large amounts of money.
Many customers will not be comfortable making transactions by voice, since mobile phones are often used in public places. But given the popularity of call centers, there are many customers that do like the sound of a voice to do their banking. Will a virtual assitant be as good a s a human?