Visa Interactive, to users of its phone banking system: Speak and you shall be heard.
The remote banking arm of Visa U.S.A. is incorporating into the home banking systems it supplies to banks software that can interpret and act upon spoken commands.
Initially the software - which, according to its developers, "understands" speech and grammar with 96% accuracy - is being used in a bill payment application called BillPayer.
"This really is what people are accustomed to doing when they are talking to another human being over the phone and getting things done - it's just that they are interacting with a computer," said Ronald A. Croen, president and chief executive of Nuance Communication, the Menlo Park, Calif., firm that makes and markets the technology.
The software was originally developed by a spinoff of the high-tech research group SRI International.
In a recent demonstration for American Banker, the technology performed as advertised.
A computer with a voice-response unit asked the customer how much to pay, and to whom when to pay the bill. The human demonstrator used conversational phrases like "pay the water company," "forty-five dollars," and "on the first of the month."
After pausing to make sure that it "heard" properly, the computer said that it would pay the bill and provided the customer with a confirmation number.
Charles Schwab & Co. already is using the Nuance software in its VoiceBroker telephone brokerage service.
Instead of hitting touch-tone buttons to spell out a stock symbol, customers simply say the name of a company or mutual fund and the computer responds with the current selling price.
Officials at the discount brokerage said customers like the system so much, they complain when a human broker answers.
"The push-button interface is a bottleneck to interacting with information over the telephone," said Mr. Croen, who helped establish Nuance Communication in 1994.
Officials at Nuance and Visa said two banks - which they declined to identify - are installing and expect to be using BillPayer by mid-1997.
Visa Interactive executives said BillPayer is aimed, in part, at home banking customers that are put off by, or have no access to, PCs.
"There are those who want to use the PC, and there is a high number that are PC-phobic," said Joseph A. Vause, vice president of electronic banking at Visa.
"We found that financial institutions are not giving as much emphasis" to those who only use the telephone.
Because Visa Interactive provides banks with the ability to offer multiple delivery channels to the same customer, Nuance's voice-recognition technology also could be used by customers who do most of their banking by PC, but want to pay a bill or stop a payment from a telephone on the road.
"This captures the best of both worlds," said John D. Kirkpatrick, Nuance's marketing manager. "While a PC or Web-based solution has a much better interface, the installed base for the telephone is a lot larger."
Joseph Outlaw, an analyst with the financial services and telecommunications consultancy Datapro, said the voice recognition product, which sells for about $100,000, is promising.
Commercially useful voice-recognition software is "just beginning to get there," he said.
"It really works, but it won't replace the keyboard tomorrow."
