State Bank of India introduces AI-based chat assistant

The State Bank of India announced SBI Intelligent Assistant (SIA) -- a chat assistant aimed to address customer enquiries like a "bank representative" does

Arundhati Bhattacharya. Pic/AFP

The State Bank of India (SBI) on Monday announced SBI Intelligent Assistant (SIA) -- a chat assistant aimed to address customer enquiries like a "bank representative" does.

Developed by Payjo, an artificial intelligence (AI) banking platform, "SIA" is equipped to handle nearly 10,000 enquiries per second or 864 million in a day -- which is nearly 25 per cent of the queries processed by Google each day.

"SIA is a perfect example of ground-breaking banking application in AI and Conversational Banking (CB). It will enhance customer service several notches above and Payjo's expertise in the conversational banking domain helped us build 'SIA' as a superior chatbot in the global banking space," said Shiv Kumar Bhasin, CTO of SBI, in a statement.

The chat assistant would be available across multiple customer touchpoints like mobile, IVR, SMS and social media platforms. "SIA" would also be enabled to interact in most regional languages.

"'SIA' is a revolution in the banking industry. It is set to disrupt the way banks and customers interact," added Srinivas Njay, Founder and CEO of Payjo.

Currently, the chat assistant can address enquiries on banking products and services. It is trained with a large set of knowledge and is adept at answering frequently asked questions.

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