Money talks

By Rodney Appleyard

It has never been easy for blind or partially-sighted people to cope with ATM machines, unable as they are to read the instructions on the screen. But this is all about to change.

For those in our community that are blind or visually impaired, often some of the mundane chores that most of us take for granted take on far more difficult proportions.Thanks to a partnership forged between NCR and Scansoft, making transactions at an ATM will soon no longer be one of those onerous tasks.

Blind and visually impaired banking customers will soon be guided through each banking transaction at the ATM with the aid of a voice activated system that reads out the menu and asks them which options they would like to take next.

ScanSoft is providing the text-to-speech (TTS) enabling tool, which will be combined with NCR's APTRA customer information database to provide a pleasant and easy-to-understand synthetic voice which knows everything about the customer's banking requirements.

The user will be required to simply insert personal headphones into the ATM audio jack and swipe their bank card. They will then have access to displays of their bank balance, account fund transfers and other vital personal information.

Peter Chidiac, the Regional Director of ScanSoft in Asia-Pacific, is confident that visually impaired people will be satisfied with the quality of access and service provided by ScanSoft's RealSpeak Solo TTS engine into the ATM units. This system can seamlessly convert dynamic text into natural-sounding speech.

"About 300,000 people in Australia are affected by some kind of sight impairment. It will provide more access for those people in a way which is natural for them to respond to prompts, instead of having to navigate using Braille or stumbling over the keys. They will have all of the banking information available to them that they need. In the past, technology sounded a little bit robotic. However, our Text To Speech technology is a much more natural sounding system. So this means that the visually impaired user will have a more pleasant experience instead of having to put up with a robotic sounding engine.

"In the future, the Text To Speech technology will become more and more natural sounding. I think that we will probably see the proliferation of this throughout the ATM network everywhere. There is something like 15,000 ATMs between Australia and New Zealand, and most of these need to be upgraded from an old operating system to support our technology. There are a few trials going on at financial institutions, which I believe will eventuate into more and more ATMs having this capability."

The new system will also be available in multiple languages. Robert Mascitti, who works as an Administrator for Blind Citizens Australia in Brisbane is visually impaired himself. He currently finds the present ATM machines very frustrating, but he is looking forward to trying these new speaking cash operators.

"I try to avoid ATMs at the moment as much as possible, because they are so difficult to use. But I will definitely use them a lot more if there is a voice to guide me through the options. The voice will need to read out everything on the screen, and each area of the menu. I would like to be asked to respond to "yes" and "no" questions, such as "would you like a receipt?", "would you like to use another service?" There is not much of a problem using the keyboard, because a lot of banks have brail key pads, but more of them need to use brail. Having a natural sounding voice will definitely make the experience more pleasant too."

So it seems there is a huge potential to satisfy many visually impaired people with this new service.

NCR believe that their APTRA software benefits all customers as well as visually impaired customers. They are proposing to expand their windows based database system, which holds all of the information on banking customer accounts, so that it can provide more personal services to customers and also help with the marketing ideas of banks. They are planning to launch an updated version of this software called APTRA Relate.Ron De Pasquale, the Professional Services, Practice Partner of NCR Australia, explains how it works.

"APTRA can analyse information and check if any offers are relevant to the customer. For example, it can tell people if their chequebook or card is at a branch ready for pick-up; your mortgage rates have changed, or you have received a salary increase.

"The service won't be invasive because we use the keyboard entry time in between the customer's choice of transaction to ask questions which relate directly to the customer. We call this the 'idle' time and it will usually be something important, relevant and interesting to the customer."

A new survey by Harris Interactive shows that there is a genuine need for better customer services too. The results reveal that people generally feel that financial companies could do a much better job of personalising ATMs for each customer's needs. 79 percent believe that banks should try to provide customers with the information they want when then need it. So the APTRA system could become a very popular new application for ATMs.

29 percent of people interviewed also said that they would respond to banking services they were interested in, if the offer could be immediately completed or initiated whilst the ATM was processing their key transaction. For example, offers of credit cards and loans could be accepted by customers if the person using the machine could respond quickly to the enquiry without being held up.

NCR believes this system could eventually save banks a lot of money whilst improving their service to the customers, whatever their current customer relationship strategy is at the moment. ATM offers would save on the cost of sending mail and be used to establish quicker responses to loan enquiries.

Through the combined use of ScanSoft speech systems and APTRA Relate technology, customers-visually impaired or otherwise - are in a good position to find their banking needs much easier to complete, whilst banks will have the opportunity to improve their communication with customers.