Chat-Bots will Automate Banking

The voice revolution is going to disrupt financial institutions and banking. This is simple, because with the rise of mobile banking, consumer voice interactions with chat-bots are going to be the most natural and most seamless communication method. 

How virtual personal assistants (VPAs) scale now, goes very quickly and how banking, and other huge institutions work, is about to change on a radical level.  Interactive voice response (IVR) systems have been around for a while, but what if they were smarter, much smarter. 

Chat-Bots will Change how Customer Service is Done

As they can now learn in real-time about our needs, with a complete history of all of our interactions, the banking chat-bots will be able to personalize services to us at a level that will soon exceed the ability of a human customer service agent. The chat-bots will be interactive and won't have to go over each step like the legacy IVRs we sometimes have to deal with. 

What chat-bots were able to guide us through nearly all the financial services we require when we visit our local bank? It would mean a huge loss of service jobs in our financial institutions which now looks inevitable. 

Voice recognition accuracy has rapidly surpassed 90% and is approaching the 99% threshold for accuracy.

As these chat-bots transform everything from information booths in malls, to call-centers the world over, how this technology scales to banking and financial services creates one significant step in the automation of services that seems now inevitable and cost-efficient. 

IoT meets Androids with Interactive Voice Interfaces 

The idea of an always-on chat-bot ready to serve you, may take the form of the Pepper robot, perhaps the less threatening and most emotionally companionable android you might find at a business or at home. How AI and androids will be modulated to show emotional adaptability and display psycho-social fluency is one of the key challenges of tech companies to make friction of adoption with the mainstream population less of an issue. 

In Retail, I listen to the skeptics of older generations that cannot imagine chat-bot smart androids taking over sales association positions. But in 5, 10 years or 20 years time, will they have changed their minds?

Modern speech recognition systems combined with text-to-speed voices have come a long ways, and are approaching near indescribable human likeness. This means, you may not know if you are talking to a human or a chat-bot. This allows for voice-driven computing to take on functional jobs in society, as when you order tickets for a business trip or make your order for take out Pizza. 

As these chat-bots are able to learn, the period before 2020, is a training period for the chat-bot revolution to take place. Financial services remains one of the key areas where important interactions in this process will take place. 

Smart Home Pushes Innovation 

With the advent of voice search in the home, Amazon's Echo/Alexa and Google Home and Apple's Siri will train us, habituate us and make this all seem quite normal. By the time we interact with chat-bots everywhere where customer services is required, it will already have become the new normal. 

Whether IMB's Watson, Microsoft's Cortana or Facebook's M or even Viv remain competitive, will have to be seen. All of this momentum is highly profitable, will indulge automation of AI taking human positions and change how we relate fundamentally to our urban environments. 

The chat-bot revolution basically heralds the advent of truly smart-cities. Banks as legacy institutions, have to keep up or risk being disrupted by FinTech solutions. 

The rate of chat-bot integration in the early 2020s, occurs as a speed we cannot even imagine in 2016, as a number of technologies converge with IoT, the Cloud, and more sophisticated machine learning and predictive analytics embedded into everything and a proliferation of smart devices. 

Voice as the Key Interface of the Future

The rise of voices search is inevitable, because it is more seamless and immediate. Voice search queries on Google, for example, are up 35 times since 2008. Brian Roemmele, is an interesting figure in all this to follow, you can follow his blog here. If you are curious about how chat-bots will impact banking, continue reading there. 

Siri's intelligence did not scale well leading to a somewhat lack luster adoption of the Apple Watch. This has opened the door to a frantic race in the advent of the chat-bot revolution with more than a dozen serious virtual personal assistant (VPA) type platforms and solutions. 

However Apple has acquired Emotient, Perceptio and VocalIQ, all relevant in how Siri could scale. Google Home's demo offered up a level of interaction and follow up questions we had not previously seen. 

How voice tech scales with machine-learning in how environments and services are personalized to our presence is one of the driving forces of evolution in the 2020s. This is when of course, IoT, the internet of things finally comes of age. 

The Smart Bank is Coming 

The smart bank remains one of the major developments after the arrival of the truly smart home. With a proliferation of FinTech startups, we are indeed at the start of a major change in how we do financial services and in the future of the banking industry itself. Every year, there are new mobile solutions implicated in transactions, payments and novel ideas banks would have never thought of. 

Amazon is reputed to have a staff of 1,000 working on improving Alexa. This means the chat-bot revolution is heating up between the major American tech Giants. If Amazon's AWS is one of the largest virtual computer platforms on the planet, natural dialogue with Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri and Viv services are literally just around the corner. The IBM Watson commercials look impressive and give us a feeling of what is in store for chat-bots in the context of banking and financial services. 

That AI will soon be able to replace financial advisers is nearly guaranteed, not simply doing customer service. 

Due to the huge payoff of chat-bots, the race pushes innovation in voice activated services to a level of frantic competition which the world has not seen before. The banking industry, like Retail, remain just epic clients and payoffs. 

Voice payments from home will be quite natural, as Echo or Google Home will connect with third party apps in any number of ways. How much we will have to frequent banks, if at all, remains a serious question. 

If anyone understands, it's Google, the importance of voice search for the future of convenience and seamless transactions in an increasingly digital world. Advertizing will not exist in its current form and neither will SEO, when PVAs will do our bidding online. 

Chat-bots are the holy grail, the human like intermediaries between humans, devices and services. This has implications on how most of the important companies in the world will function even just 5 years from now. Including Facebook, Apple, Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM, Samsung, Sony, Oracle, etc...

Chat-Bot Revolution is the Catalyst of AI

If the ecosystem of Viv takes off, from the markers of Siri, we'll see a new software layer rise like wildfire changing the future of the internet itself. 

Chat bots therefore usher in an era of exponential programming. This will have implications on how FinTech, Ed Tech, Health Tech and the on-demand and sharing economies scale and evolve. 

Viv, perhaps, has a higher chance of scaling due to how its natural learning systems work, that can be trained from experience and not hard-coded. This dynamically evolving systems (DES) architecture could mean the beginning of sentient AI. #BigIdeas

• Taught by the world
• Learning each second
• Picking out keywords to understand context

The dominant chat-bot system will be the most fluid, adaptive, interactive, publicly accessible and able to learn. 

Voice Commerce

In the future our interaction with chat-bots will be dialogue based and it will adapt to us and be personalized to us. In person, online, in-app and retail purchasing and transactions will all be implicated. 

Voice banking will mean, we won't be served primary by humans, but the majority will be chat-bots.  The ghost in the machine will be alive, friendly and emotionally intelligent as well. 

”In the next 10 years, 50% of all banking interactions will be via Voice First devices.”
— Brian Roemmele, Founder of PayFinders

AI will also scale with voice interactions, as they "learn" from us. Due to the repetitive nature of transactions, this is not very complex. Remotely stocking our homes with consumables or making a banking transaction will seem totally normal without having to do anything but speak. 

Millennials who require greater convenience will prefer voice based interactions to the way banking or healthcare service is done now. Convenience will trump job security, as humanity moves forwards with chat-bots. Voice first experiences will make everything easier and more simple, without having to deal with the moods of human beings, their biases about us or other annoyances. 

How do you believe the chat-bot revolution will influence banking and financial services?