Robot Bank of Scotland: UK lender introduces 'warm, approachable' AI to talk to customers

After a several-month trial in which staff used the AI internally, while they dealt with business clients, RBS will let Luvo talk directly to the outside world by the end of 2016. Luvo functions as a chatbot – a program that opens when you access the bank's website – that you can ask typical customer service questions, concerning lost PINs and credit cards that need to be replaced. At first glance, this is nothing extraordinary, and chatbots have become a frequent feature for websites dealing with a large flow of individual queries. But RBS and IBM, which spent millions developing the program together, say that it is revolutionary, with a nuanced understanding of human speech, a "unique" personality, and an ability to learn on the job. "To be helpful it has to understand dialogue," the bank's managing director of digitization, Chris Popple, explained in a presentation earlier this year.