Singapore bank wants you to talk to its chatbot to get your banking done

SINGAPORE — Would you interact with your bank more if you could text it?

Singaporean bank DBS announced on Wednesday it's going to have chatbots that you can text to do some of your common banking transactions.

Unlike with the SMS service it and many other banks have in place, the bots are intended to process natural language conversations, so you don't have to memorise SMS codes or get the syntax perfect for things to work.

This means instead of texting the bank something like "BALANCE 1234", you can ask: "How much money do I have in account number 1234?"

A sample conversation provided by DBS.

IMAGE: DBS BANK

DBS said it's relying on U.S. firm Kasisto to power the chatbots. Kasisto is a spin-off of SRI International, which created Apple's iPhone voice bot, Siri.

It appears the chatbots will first come to SMS and later to chat messengers like WhatsApp and WeChat.

Chatbots have had varied success simulating real conversation. Reactions range from annoyance with the bots' repetitive responses, to surprise that the machines have figured out what you really want.

In April this year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed the desire for businesses to build chatbots in Messenger, so they can serve customers on his platform.

But for now, as most chatbots still rely on guessing what you want through keywords, the conversation may not be entirely intelligent just yet.