interface.ai Launches Industry-First Spanish GenAI Voice Banking Assistant

Leader in conversational AI advances telephone banking with the industry’s first GenAI-powered multilingual voicebot.

Since its inception in 2015, interface.ai has consistently led the development of AI for financial services. With this mission at its core, interface.ai marks yet another highly significant milestone – the launch of the industry’s first Spanish language voice banking assistant powered by GenAI.

With this GenAI-powered capability, banks and credit unions can now support both Spanish- and English-speaking customers more efficiently, accurately, and inclusively than ever before. The likes of Great Lakes Credit Union and McCoy Federal Credit Union have already adopted the solution – and here’s why.

Native Spanish voice – Why it matters

In today’s North American contact centers, the need to offer more than just English voice support is increasingly clear. According to the latest US census, nearly 68 million people in the US speak a language other than English at home, with Spanish constituting over 61% of this group.

Contact centers face significant challenges in catering to this diverse language mix. Here are some solutions they could adopt, and their major limitations.

• Hire bilingual agents

Why it doesn’t work: Finding bilingual agents can be challenging and costly. On top of this, these agents may need specific onboarding and the creation of new resources, such as language-specific knowledge bases, documentation, and scripts. And what happens if you rely on outsourced providers for overflow or outside business hours that can’t provide bilinguality?

• Adopt real-time translation tools

Why it doesn’t work: Despite advancements, machine translation systems typically lack high-level understanding. They often struggle to grasp context, idiomatic expressions, and cultural nuances. This can create errors or misinterpretations which frustrate callers and result in low containment rates. There may also be concerns regarding data security and privacy, particularly with third-party vendors. 

• Use pre-recorded messages and scripts

Why it doesn’t work: This solution is not suitable for complex or unique queries. Its scope is very limited to common and straightforward questions and often falls short of today’s customer expectations. The messages can also feel very robotic and impersonal. On top of this, the messages can quickly become outdated and require manual and regular updating to ensure accurate responses.

The solution? Voice GenAI that doesn’t just speak Spanish, but is Spanish

interface.ai’s GenAI voice banking assistant is built natively in Spanish, rather than relying on real-time translation tools like all other financial service voice AI providers. Here are some of the benefits of this native Spanish voice solution, above and beyond the drawbacks of the other alternatives:

1. Greater understanding means greater automation

Built natively in Spanish, interface.ai’s GenAI voice assistant understands and responds to more questions with greater accuracy and cultural sensitivity compared to systems that rely on translation services.

By combining Generative AI with native Spanish capabilities, interface.ai’s intelligent voice assistant has an unrivaled understanding of language, idiomatic expressions and cultural context. This drives greater accuracy – critical in an industry where precision and clarity are paramount. It also helps to offer greater personalization and minimize offense through cultural ignorance. What’s more, this high-level of intelligence naturally drives much higher rates of automation. interface.ai’s voice AI provides full containment rates of up to 60% to transform a costly contact center into a revenue-generating hub.

2. Commitment to inclusivity and equal access

Offering a native Spanish voice assistant demonstrates a very strong commitment to inclusivity and equal access to financial services. 

Banking is a basic, fundamental service that everyone should have access to. Living in such a global world, it’s vital for banks and credit unions to go beyond language barriers to support their diverse base. This is particularly pertinent in the U.S. where 41 million people are native Spanish speakers and over 12 million are bilingual. By providing native Spanish voice, interface.ai helps even more customers have equal access to the banking support they need.

As Great Lakes Credit Union, who has adopted interface.ai’s GenAI Spanish speaking voice assistant, puts it; “This enhancement reflects our commitment to serving all members… affirming our dedication to our Spanish-speaking community. At Great Lakes Credit Union, we’re setting new standards for member service in the credit union industry, ensuring that all members receive the support they need, wherever they are.”

3. Mitigate outsourcing issues

interface.ai’s 24/7 Spanish voice assistant helps overcome the challenges of outsourcing in other languages when needing overflow and after-hours support.

If contact centers rely on bilingual agents, two major issues arise when outsourcing. Firstly, they either can’t provide support to their Spanish-speaking customers in these situations. Or secondly, they have to rely on a bilingual outsourcing partner and trust they implement strict quality assurance protocols to maintain language and service consistency.With interface.ai’s always-on voice AI, not only are these challenges of Spanish-speaking outsourcing eliminated, but the need for outsourcing entirely. With 24/7 availability and an average call containment rate of 60%, most contact centers can do away with outsourcing and significantly cut costs.

4. Avoid costly bilingual staff hiring & training

By implementing a highly-intelligent GenAI native Spanish voice assistant, contact centers don’t have to deal with the extra cost and resources involved in hiring bilingual staff.

As mentioned above, bilingual agents in the U.S., especially those fluent in Spanish, often earn high wages. According to most recent data, bilingual call center agents in the U.S. earn approximately $5,200 per year more than monolingual agents. On top of this, organizations will have to translate all customer service material, ensuring it remains accurate and culturally-sensitive. With interface.ai’s Spanish Voice assistant, all these costly issues are immediately removed. Better still, Interface.ai ties cost directly to measurable results with performance-based pricing.

5. Expand market reach

By offering native Spanish voice assistance, interface.ai opens the door to millions of Spanish-speaking customers and members who may require, or simply prefer, a bank or credit union that speaks their native tongue.

This allows financial institutions to penetrate new markets and expand their customer base by providing services that cater specifically to the ever-growing Spanish-speaking population within the U.S.

Wrap-up

interface.ai prides itself on consistently leading the development of AI in financial services. It’s our continued mission to advance AI innovation in the industry to help banks and credit unions better serve their customers and members. With this latest product development, we hope we can help institutions provide even greater equal access to financial services.

If you’d like to learn more about interface.ai’s GenAI voice banking assistant, get in touch with us today.