I just got out of a meeting at SRI International, where representatives from both SRI and international banking group BBVA showed off something they’ve been working on for the past couple of years.
Currently, SRI is best known as the research institute where Siri was developed before spinning out into a separate company and eventually being acquired by Apple, where it powers the Siri feature on the iPhone. SRI and BBVA have been collaborating on a new project, Lola, which they’re pitching as a successor of sorts to Siri. Bill Mark, SRI’s VP of Information and Computer Sciences, calls it “the next generation personal assistant”.
In this case, that personal assistant technology is being applied to a specific industry — banking. (Banking was, incidentally, one of the industries called out by Siri co-founder and former CEO Dag Kittlaus when he wrote a column for TechCrunch about the future potential of the virtual personal assistant.) BBVA Chief Innovation Officer Beatriz Lara Bartolomé says Lola is named after a real BBVA sales agent in Madrid, Spain. Her numbers were orders of magnitude better than anyone else’s, and when BBVA researchers interviewed her about the secrets of her success, they were most impressed by her passion and enthusiasm for the customers.
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