Lakshmi, the banking robot, helps answer your common banking queries in Chennai

As far as India is concerned, robots are either the subject of a lot of research at technology institutes, are seen as part of a technology festival or are used in an industrial setup on the assembly line. But there are few cases where robots have been used in a daily usage scenario. Unlike other South East Asian countries where robots have entered households in the form of pets or virtual assistants or even as hotel receptionists, India does not have a similar case study.

Well, Lakshmi might just change that perception. Lakshmi is India’s first ever banking robot which made its debut at City Union Bank’s T Nagar branch in Chennai earlier this month.

The artificial intelligence powered Lakshmi will be the first on-site bank helper to assist bank customers get answers to the most common queries they ask of bank staff. Lakshmi, can answer up to 120 basic questions, which the bank authorities said were the most commonly asked questions.

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“About 95 percent of the questions asked by customers were repetitive. We have fed the inputs and Lakshmi will be able to answer them,” said N Kamakodi, City Union Bank managing director and CEO to The Hindu .

Lakshmi has been imported from France and been customised in Coimbatore’s Vishnu Engineering college to make it more relevant for answering banking queries. It can inform users about bank’s history, its lending and deposit rates, special schemes for students and so on. The service will start in English, but will soon support other regional languages as well.

According to Kamakodi, City Union Bank plans to have around 25 to 30 robots installed in different branches by March 2017. Lakshmi will also be integrated with the Core Banking System, which will enable it to provide information related to user accounts. Lakshmi takes a call as to which information can be said out loud and which information needs to be displayed discreetly (such as your bank balance).

Considering Lakshmi is powered by artificial intelligence, it can understand contextual queries. It is also constantly learning from its customers, and it will get better the more interactions it has, said a bank executive.

According to its assembler Vijay V Shah from Vishnu Engineering college in Coimbatore, Lakshmi has a work around to improve its intelligence if it cannot answer your question outright. Lakshmi guides customers to the branch manager for questions it cannot answer, but in the backend data is being collected and Lakshmi is constantly being fed with data-sets to improve its knowledge.

Apart from answering queries for regular customers, Kamakodi says that there are plans to make Laskhmi accessible for visually challenged bank customers as well.