Do Your Banking with a Chatbot

People in India can now open an account with a bank that's only accessible via mobile devices. Called Digibank, it's staffed by chatbots intelligent enough to answer thousands of questions submitted via chat. The machine-learning-based technology is a product of Kasisto, a New York startup that spun out of the company that created Apple's Siri assistant. Kasisto trained its KAI artificial-intelligence platform with millions of questions asked by customers during their banking experiences. "A lot of the bots that are out there are what we would consider'dumb bots.' It's very easy to break them, and it's very easy to ask an out-of-context question, and they just don't know how to handle it," says Dror Oren, Kasisto vice president of product.