USAA gives Alexa tools to talk finances
SAN ANTONIO — When Darrius Jones asked whether he could afford $100 on dinner, Amazon’s Alexa didn’t mince words. He was already $18.14 over his monthly restaurant budget, she told him.
Alexa didn’t argue over how the money was spent. She didn’t judge. She simply relayed the information in her cool, monotone, not-quitehuman voice that’s become a family fixture in more than 10 million homes across the U.S.
The assistant vice president of USAA Labs was showing the company’s latest pet project last week. Using a fake account, he was showing off a pilot program that gives customers account access via Alexa.
The San Antonio company is looking for customers to try it out by signing up online. It’s designed to help with budgeting by making it easier to check account balances and analyze spending, USAA said in a press release.
“Talking about your finances can be painful at times,” Jones said in an interview. “And so when you think of the emotion around having a conversation about your personal finances, we believe this is the first step of many to allow people to have that conversation continuously with us as an organization.” Customers that have an Alexa device — like the Amazon Echo or the recently-debuted Echo Show — can enable the feature through the device’s app, which can then be linked to their bank account. That allows Alexa to answer questions as basic as “How much money do I have?” or more complex, like “How much did I spend on restaurants in Austin last month?”
Users can also add a six-digit voice PIN for additional security, the company said.
The pilot runs for 90 days and USAA Labs is capping the number of people who can participate at 400 for now, Jones said. The company, which provides insurance, banking and other financial services to members of the military and their families, has more than 12 million customers.
Alexa can also offer feedback on spending habits, he said. The goal isn’t to have a computer tell members what to do with their money, USAA emphasized, but to educate customers about their finances so they can put their money to good use.
The company hasn’t yet enabled transaction capabilities, Jones said, so friends can’t walk into a house and tell her to send them cash.
“We don’t believe there’s enough security controls in place to do that,” he said. “But once there are, and there’s a lot of indications we’ll get there either through our own development or through partnership with Amazon, once those security controls are in place, that’ll probably be a good place to start thinking about additional experimentation.”
USAA’s new function leverages artificial intelligence technology from Clinc to make the experience with Alexa sound more conversational. The technology is supposed to help Alexa better understand what a customer is trying to say without needing a specific command, Jones said.
Jones said the company has to sometimes give customers “things that people aren’t asking for” and don’t yet know they need. “No one asked for Alexa to be conversational, but we realized that in not being conversational people weren’t adopting (Alexa), and so we had to find the answer” so customers would use it more, he said.
Clinc’s artificial intelligence conversation management technology enables Alexa to remember “context, follow-up questions, and complex human language,” the company said in announcing the new feature.
“This technology will also learn as members interact with it and infer information not explicitly specified by users throughout a conversation,” according to the announcement.
In the demonstration, Alexa was able to answer, for example, “How much money do I have?” by giving a total dollar amount across the user’s accounts, inferring that the person wanted an overarching number and not one specific to checking, or savings. And then Alexa was able to answer follow-up questions such as: “How much is in my checking?” and “How about my savings?”
Clinc co-founder and CEO Jason Mars says his company’s technology goes far beyond Alexa’s standard capabilities.
“That standard Alexa skill is kind of like, you have to say things with rules, if you say something that it doesn’t understand it says, ‘Please ask me for a list of commands,’ ” Mars, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, said in a phone interview.
“You like to use free natural language, messy language, slang, correct yourself mid-sentence, etc. etc. to interact with AI,” Mars said. “And so we have a technology that makes a giant leap forward in achieving that.”
When asked how the feature is better than something like the personal finance service Mint, Mars gave the example of wanting to find out how much you spent on restaurants while you were in Greece last week.
“You can do that in Mint,” he said. “But it will take you significantly longer and more work than just asking, hey how much did I spend on restaurants in Greece last week? And then, oh you spent $400 in Greece last week.”
Clinc launched last year and is working with about 10 financial institutions right now, Mars said. USAA is the first to roll out the company’s technology to its customers, Mars said.
USAA started working with Alexa in 2016 while participating in the PYMNTS.com Alexa Challenge. They won the “Easiest to Explain to Mom” designation, according to the announcement, for a prototype that allowed users to add to their savings using Alexa.
“I was actually pretty proud of that because I have a mother who is very critical of our work,” Jones said. “And her claim to fame is, Darrius, I just want to walk into your house and use a remote, and the TV actually turn on.”
“Talking about your finances can be painful at times.” Darrius Jones, USAA Labs