CIBC has made accessing banking and mortgage services by phone easier with the launch of state-of-the-art speech recognition technology.

Using only their voices, CIBC’s more than 2.5 million telephone banking customers can now register their bills from any phone at any time. Over the next several months CIBC will incorporate speech recognition in additional retail banking applications including bill payment, cheque re-ordering and its branch and bank machine locator service.

Since early last year, CIBCÕs Investor’s Edge clients have been able to obtain real-time quotes with an easy-to-use voice-activated telephone quote service. Using simple voice commands from virtually any touch-tone phone across Canada, clients can also place equity trades, review account information and open orders.

“Speech recognition systems are revolutionizing telephone services and we’re pleased to be the first financial institution in Canada to roll out retail banking applications giving our customers more choice and convenience in the way they manage their finances,” says Janice Wagner, vice-president, channel strategy and development, direct to consumer banking, CIBC.

“We are introducing speech recognition applications in response to our customers’ demands for more self-service options that make it faster and simpler for them to do business with us,” says Wagner. “Customers are already choosing to complete 80 per cent of all calls using our automated telephone banking service and this technology allows us to add services that were previously too complex to automate. Providing a speech interface eliminates the cumbersome and tedious touch-tone entry of longer alphanumeric strings required for some transactions. Now customers can simply say the name of the bill they want to register, the type of mortgage information they need, or name of the stock they want to trade. It’s simple, intuitive and convenient.”

Speech recognition technology answers customers in a natural-sounding voice, immediately responds to spoken instructions, and completes the transaction. Once customers become familiar with the service, they can speak over prompts and complete their transactions even more quickly.