The financial sector is in a complete sole searching quest for their future business models. Being an industry that essentially deals with information the impacts of the digital transformation are felt in all areas, but surely interaction with costumers is particularly sensible due to the user experience with other services in the cloud.
Link has provided many solutions for digital banking in particular the BankOnBox a complete solution for home banking. Recently, an MVP was developed to provide a conversational interface in Portuguese for BankOnBox.
The MVP provides a natural conversational flow in Portuguese for all operations usually found in a home banking and is complemented by cards and adaptive cards for simplifying user interaction. Link has been conducting several projects in conversational interfaces and has perfected a methodology to specify dialogues, capture the context and the integrations with external services.
The user can interact through text messages via a web chat page or existing applications like Facebook’s Messenger. The conversation can also be in spoken Portuguese and the results for speech recognition were particularly good.
The interaction with BankOnBox is via its PSD2 Open Banking API, which provides the basic banking services. The conversations are obviously secure and there is provision for multiple authentication schemes, particularly the ability of federating identifies from external identification providers.
The technology used was centered in the Azure Bot framework provided by Microsoft. LUIS was used for the natural language processing, Bing spell for typo corrections and Bing speech API for voice recognition and generation.
