US Bank to Join USAA in Offering Mobile Voice Control Technology
US Bank announced it will soon begin offering voice control technology to users of its FlexPerks mobile app. The technology is provided by Nuance, a provider of digital speech and imaging tools.
Specifically, US Bank is installing Nina, the Siri-like virtual assistant in Nuance’s software that provides speech recognition, text-to-speech, voice biometrics and natural-language understanding. This will allows FlexPerks customers to get their account balance, make payments, and more. USAA already offers Nina to its 2.5 million mobile customers.
Employees of US Bank, based in Minneapolis, are testing the feature this week.
Times are good at Nuance. The Burlington, Mass.-based company has a strong foothold in the world of financial services with USAA and US Bank, and its mobile app Swype is mopping the floor with the competition in the Google Play app store.
USAA announced its intention to launch voice commands powered by Nuance back in August 2012, and brought the service to its app in limited release last March. The bank made a wider release of Nina — or My Mobile Assistant — earlier this month.
USAA has long had a reputation for thinking ahead and acting on it. At Bank Innovation 2013, USAA’s Stephen Armstrong said that mobile adoption was moving so quickly for USAA that online was becoming a “legacy channel.”
US Bank does not enjoy the same reputation for innovation that USAA does, but that may be unfair. The bank was the first major FI in the US to launch mobile photo bill pay, a service that allows customers to make payments — and import biller data for future payments — with the snap of a smartphone camera. And now comes the partnership with Nuance for customers of its FlexPerks Travel Rewards Visa Signature Card.
