| |September 201919new skills, there are many situations where a custom-er may want or need to interact with a human, and the best customer experience requires a seamless hand-off from bot to human.Over time, we plan to introduce virtual assistant capabilities across a variety of channels where our customers may want to carry out banking tasks. We are taking a `single bot' approach, allowing for a consistent experience for our customers no mat-ter where they communicate with us. The bot will be able to answer questions and perform tasks in the same manner, regardless of how or where the customer interacts with it. And when conversa-tions need to be transferred from bot to bankers in any given situation, the banker will have access to past conversations to essentially eliminate the need for the customer to explain their question or issue multiple times. Additionally, the next wave of NLP development includes enabling virtual assistants to better under-stand tone and emotion. For example, if a customer is using words that may signify anger or frustration, Brad Stewart, Head - NLP & AI Enterprise Solutionswe can get them connected to a real person faster, as customers are looking for an emotional connection to the brands they interact with--and humans still do that best.Team Member SupportVirtual assistants aren't only good for customer inter-actions; they also have applications to help our team members. For example, we have extensive content on internal websites across a wide range of topics such as parental leave policy, education reimbursement, international travel requirements, tips for new man-agers, and much, much more. Navigating through so many sites with all this information can be chal-lenging, and traditional keyword search is not always effective. But using AI and NLP techniques we can train a virtual assistant to understand the concepts contained in all this content, allowing team mem-bers to ask natural language questions and find an-swers quickly and easily.Security and PrivacyWhile voice is natural, there are obvious situations where you wouldn't want Alexa or Siri reading out information, and finance is full of these exam-ples. Voice can certainly be a valuable biometric in confirming one's identity, but helping custom-ers keep information private as voice technology becomes more dominant is an important ongoing discussion. It's likely we'll see a mix of voice and touch screen prompts that work together as an early solution. IN ADDITION TO PROVIDING A MORE NATURAL WAY TO COMMUNICATE, VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS MAKE IT EASIER FOR CUSTOMERS TO ENGAGE WITH A BRAND 24/7 FROM WHEREVER THEY ARE
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