NAB deploys VeCommerce speech recognition for customer service

Stuart Corner
Friday, 06 March 2009 01:58

IT Industry - Market

National Australia Bank (NAB) has implemented a voice recognition system from Salmat subsidiary VeCommerce to streamline the routing of incoming customer enquiries as part of its new customer service initiative. It may even be able to identify callers from their voice.

The bank will in future advertise a single phone number (136 NAB) to cover all customer enquiries and use VeCommerce's VeConnect natural language speech recognition application to route calls to more than 150 destinations within the bank.

Telstra managed the coordination and deployment of the system, which integrates into NAB's existing telephony infrastructure and which uses VeCommerce's Australian Financial Services Statistical Language Model. Telstra will also provide first level support. Telstra signed a MoU with VeCommerce in early 2007 to jointly develop and support speech-enabled speech-based self service and automation opportunities in call centres.

Does the bank know who's calling?
The press release announcing the NAB implementation arrived with the line "As part of the continued development of its customer service strategy NAB launched its new speech recognition and voice biometrics system in October." It was delivered again shortly afterwards with the note from the PR agency: "Have just been informed by NAB that the company has not launched a voice biometrics system as per paragraph six."

Maybe they just don't want you know that they know who your are, because VeCommerce has been pushing the biometric capabilities of its voice recognition systems for some time, and flagging just such an application.

Steve Lewis, general manager business consulting for VeCommerce in Australia told this writer in March 2008 that while deployments of voice biometric technology had to date been fairly limited, that was set to change. "We are a the cusp of seeing some major deployments. We are in the process of developing a system for a top tier financial services organisation in Australia which will roll out at the end of this year. That will be a very large scale deployment...Two of the others are looking at similar solutions: once one goes the others will follow."

VeCommerce had just presented its biometric technology at a bankers conference in the US and had presented delegates with a challenge: fool our voice biometric technology and win $US1000. No one did. The company re-iterated its claim that implementation by a large financial institution was imminent a couple of months later when it welcomed finalisation of an ISO standard for the use of voice biometrics in financial services.

It said: "A voice profile can be used to authenticate both telephone and online transactions and eliminates the need for remembering identifiers such as PINs, passwords, mother's maiden name, etc. or for having special equipment such as PIN pads or fobs. Whilst the latter can be forgotten, lost or stolen, the voice remains consistently unique and convenient to use...[We are] working with a number of Australia's top banks to implement voice biometrics within the next 12 months."