The artificial intelligence behind BBVA's virtual assistant, Blue

Your financial health has improved since last month. Would you like to know by how much?" Blue, BBVA's new virtual assistant (VA), is the one doing the talking. Blue is integrated in the bank's mobile banking app in Spain (for Android and iOS) and can respond to over 100 user requests from the more than 800 features available in the application. Blue is pleasant, patient, and able to put itself in the shoes of others. It loves talking to humans and is always willing and ready to help customers. And it wants to learn lots of things in order to become even more insightful. These are just some of the personality traits that characterize BBVA's new voice assistant, which came to life out of a complex process that factored even the most minor details. The IT consulting firm, Gartner, defines virtual assistants as tools that help users perform a series of tasks that previously required human assistance. VAs use predictive models, natural language processing tools, recommendation engines, personalization systems based on artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics to do their job: assisting users and automating tasks. "VAs listen to and observe behaviors, build and maintain data models, and predict and recommend actions," the consulting firm explains. Blue's artificial intelligence capabilities are the result of a hybrid development: made up mostly of parts created by BBVA and others based on technologies that were readily available on the market and benefit from an advanced level of maturity, such as natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Specifically, the core of the system's artificial intelligence functionality is a 100 percent BBVA in-house development called Lenny. It is based on a set of cloud-based microservices and is responsible for orchestrating all the pieces that go into making Blue work. Thanks to this BBVA-developed'artificial brain', Blue is connected to the application functionalities that are powered by advanced data analytics. Examples include predicted banking transactions and financial health features, which the BBVA virtual assistant makes readily available to the customers by using natural, human-like dialog. "During the development of Blue, one of the most significant challenges was ensuring that we could cover the full range of functionality that BBVA, as a major player, offers in its app -- recognized as the most complete on the market -- in a voice and text-based virtual assistant," Eliseo Catalán, Head of BBVA Spain's Smart Assistants explains. Achieving this required that all the features in the app -- offered thanks to BBVA's digital capabilities -- were correctly set up and that each use case was thoroughly trained so that the user is given the appropriate response at every juncture of the customer journey. "We do all of this for the various platforms that might have different capabilities.