What is voice technology?
Voice technology is the combination of Artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and User Experience resulting in the curation of an efficient, hands-free technology making it a real-life incarnation of science fiction. It has the power to impart life and speech to inanimate objects- your speakers, your home, your television, or your mobile phone. As humans, we crave conversations, communications. Voice technology works towards connecting humans with technology. Playing your favorite songs, locking your bedroom door, dimming your lights; everything has become just a voice-request away. It’s like having your own virtual assistant to help you perform certain tasks, always at your service.
How has voice technology revolutionized financial sectors and banking services ?
Voice technology is not only prevalent in our residences, mobiles, or just smart security cameras. It has reached greater heights by bringing about major changes in the health and financial sectors as well. We’re not limited to “Alexa, play ‘so and so’ music from Spotify’ or “Hey Google, I’m home” anymore. We can now ask them to provide their smart assistance in banking and financial services as well. We can now pay car and home loans, mortgages, electricity bills, and check our bank statements and perform numerous transactions, just with the help of voice. Banks such as ICICI. HSBC, Royal Bank of Canada, and so forth, have already been ahead in implementing voice technology into their apps and services to simplify complicated application configurations for the customers.
Accounting services are now made easy since the implementation of voice technology
With voice-first technology disrupting every sector of industry such as health, finance, and so forth, more and more people are welcoming and adopting this technology into their lives. A lot of banking sectors such as The Westpac Banking Corporation has rolled out a feature with the help of which banking is made easy to their customers, thanks to smart voice assistants. ICICI bank declared its partnership with Amazon Alexa to aid its banking facilities, with the help of which each customer can access the app and avail the necessary services with the help of smart voice assistants during the wake of the global pandemic, where they are advised to stay indoors. We can simply speak out our queries related to recent transactions, bank balance, and mini statements, and our assistants shall avail and announce the information to us!
Voice assistants use the tactics of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to decode the user’s speech into text, perform a series of backend automation, and produce the necessary output. They can even read the headlines and news of your bank’s application and the updates and alerts that they have been posting, sparing us the worry of missing out on crucial information due to whatsoever reasons.
No more fiddling through the app to perform minor to major transactions
Paying bills for insurance, utilities, mortgages are now a piece of cake, thanks to voice technology. Banks are now introducing voice technology into their applications to facilitate their customers in performing voice-activated transactions with utmost ease. We don’t have to quest through the app for options and figure out the method to perform a simple transaction anymore. Our smart voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant can transfer money to a recipient, pay our insurance and home loan bills, even tell us the latest transactions, and much more, all with the help of voice-commands. All we need to do is say “Alexa, I want to transfer money to-” the name of the respective recipient followed by the amount, and it shall be done in a split second.
Banking and financial services are safer and more secure
Speech recognition uses Natural language Processing to decode speech into text and produce the necessary output. However, voice technology-based companies are trying to develop an advanced security system that would provide access to customers based on their voice. Every individual’s voice is unique and different from the other. Banking systems are trying to introduce this technique to improve their system security. Many a time, if not interacted with your smart voice assistant for long, they tend to act haywire and complicated due to the incapability of remembering an individual’s voice after a long period of halt. Nuance is developing a technology that would be able to remember and recognize a person’s voice even after long durations, taking voice-activated security services a notch higher in market.
Future of Voice Technology in Banking and Financial Sectors
According to recent reports revealed by call tracking and analytics from Ivoca reported that 70% of people used voice technology to check their bank statements, 59% used it to pay bills and 48% used it to track their expenditure. Voice technology is taking huge strides into completely revolutionizing the way brands and the corporate world would interact with their customers. Companies are trying to integrate Siri to facilitate mobile banking, since voice-first technology is sweeping the market off its feet all over the world. HSBC prevented a fraud loss of over 300 million euros, thanks to its launch of VoiceID, which can identify an individual based on the technology of voice-biometric. Infamous companies such as MasterCard, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Barclays, Royal Bank of Canada, and Santander have already introduced voice technology integrated banking services.
Why would the rest of the world stay behind?
