Yes Bank uses Microsoft’s AI platform for chatbot

India’s fourth largest private sector bank Yes Bank announced its partnership with Microsoft to develop its artificial intelligence (AI) enabled chatbot, Yes Robot.

The new and improved chatbot will be built on Microsoft’s AI platform, enabling users to carry out financial and non-financial banking transactions with an AI chatbot well-versed in the banking world.

Yes Bank hopes the partnership will personalise interactions with customers and reduce the time-of-first-response to “just a few seconds”.

“Recognising that chatbots would be game changers in the industry, providing major competitive advantage to banks, Yes Bank had started working on automating several processes and service touch points through Bots as early as 2016,” says the bank’s chief digital officer (CDO), Ritesh Pai.

The Yes Robot has an advanced natural language processing (NLP) engine, and strives to be “a holistic AI ecosystem” according to the bank’s CIO, Anup Purohit.

He adds: “Customers can launch the chatbot on social media platforms such as Facebook, and in future we plan to integrate the bot and provide access through other channels.”

The chatbot gives customers access to more than 65 banking products, loan eligibility checks and, once basic checks are complete, human relationship managers.

One of the most interesting features of this chatbot is the option to book fixed deposits (FDs) and recurring deposits (RDs) without the need to remember any passwords or register.

Even with human errors, the chatbot boasts a 90% accuracy on understanding the intent of the user.