Artificial Intelligence assistants are not new. Voice Recognition and Natural Language Processing have been evolving year by year, and it's a matter of time until these technologies combined with context understanding, intent, and other AI enablers will work seamlessly.
This project was about creating an authentic banking experience that empowers customers with a natural dialog. People could get meaningful financial insights, valuable suggestions and access to relevant tools just by asking so. Leveraging the new technological capabilities of AI and Analytics as means to assist customers, this was an exploration into how Conversational Experiences, enabled by a virtual Financial Assistant can change the retail banking.
Questions such as "how, what, where, or when" always have to be asked when designing a conversational experience. The product and mental models have to be aligned for digital products to make sense and be accessed in this fashion. There’s also a learning curve that discourages users from achieving goals vs using traditional interfaces. As humans, we are driven by the “I need” paradigm that is natural in identifying ways to achieve goals, and going back to this basic form is key.
AI, Natural Language and Analytics are powerful technologies that can declutter the ways we interact with digital products, because the “I need..” statement can now be understood better. Human language is still the fastest way of communication between humans, it helped us survive, evolve and now we’re making technology work the in the same way.
