The Personal Finance Manager app of the St.Galler Kantonalbank now understands Swiss German.

Zurich, July 2019 - As of now, the Personal Finance Manager (PFM) app of the St.Galler Kantonalbank has a speech recognition function that also understands Swiss German. SGKB is the first bank in Switzerland to offer a new form of customer interaction in the Mobile Banking app. Spitch, Swiss provider of solutions in automated speech recognition, implemented the new voice user interface together with the bank.

Customers of the St.Galler Kantonalbank can now initiate queries in the PFM directly by voice. For this purpose, the app was provided with a "voice button", making data entry for queries via a smartphone much easier.

Developing the solution, it was important to ensure that the PFM understands Swiss German. Falk Kohlmann, Head of Digital Banking at SGKB, emphasizes this condition as follows: “Our customers are speaking with us as a regional bank in Swiss German dialect. This is the “feeling at home” which we also provide for our App. And of course, the Solution also understands High German”

“Voice-driven functions offer an easy access to banking services and could become an interesting interface for our customers. This was the main reason for us to start gaining more experience with the advanced voice technologies,” added Falk Kohlmann.

Jürg Schleier, Country Manager DACH at Spitch, describes SGKB's implementation as another significant milestone for Spitch: "The introduction of a voice interface solution for SGKB customers clearly underlines the growing importance of voice-based customer interfaces. It is expected that the next generation of consumers will be able to fully operate their devices with voice input. Among others, this will permanently change the customer interactions of financial and insurance service providers. In doing so, our solutions will make a significant contribution to achieving customer satisfaction with a concomitant cost reduction for the provider.”

Visit the case studies page on the Spitch website to learn more about the SGKB project and other interesting projects in Swiss and European companies where Spitch implemented solutions in voice biometrics (VB), automatic speech recognition (ASR), voice user interfaces (VUI) and natural language data analytics.