RBS says its AI customer assistant Luvo is "twelve months ahead" of other UK banks

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) said that it is "at least twelve months ahead" of the competition when it comes to its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for banking customers called Luvo, and will release it to the public in twelve months, according to managing director of digitisation Chris Popple. RBS announced that it was working on an AI assistant back in March and speaking at the inaugural AI Summit in London today Popple talked about how the pilots have been going and where Luvo will eventually live (the answer is everywhere). Luvo is a natural language processing AI bot which will answer RBS, Natwest and Ulster bank customer's questions and perform simple banking tasks like money transfers. If Luvo is unable to find the answer it will pass a customer over to a member of staff. Luvo "talks to you through WhatsApp-type interaction" and what sets it apart from digital assistants like Siri and IKEA's Ask Anna is its ability to understand context and perform tasks.