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Using AI-Driven Voice Technology to Power up the Insurance Industry

Technology and insurance are increasingly inseparable, especially now with new AI-driven voice technology that enables the Canadian insurance industry to engage with consumers in new and creative ways.

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled voice technology is the beginning of a new era, with the introduction of voice assistants taking the market by storm. This technology however, has been many decades in the making.

In 1992, in my final year at the University of Waterloo, my engineering thesis was on artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP). Back then, the algorithms developed were inaccurate and limited. The times have certainly changed. Now, in 2017, NLP is approaching human parity with accuracy approaching 95 per cent.

Virtual voice assistants like Siri, Echo, Alexa and Google Home are changing how we interact with the Internet. Gartner, a technology research company, predicts that by 2020, 30 per cent of web browsing sessions will be without the use of a screen. This is a monumental change in behaviour, especially when you consider the humble beginnings of virtual voice assistants.

The smart software-based technology, when first introduced was widely used for random location searches, delivering messages, cuing up music, or hands-free calling. With the digital landscape shifting to a whole new paradigm, however, these AI-driven voice assistants have attained a new status as being the next frontier of brand marketing.

Opportunities for Marketing

With 45 million voice-assisted devices in the U.S. alone (as found by eMarketer), insurance and financial services companies are not shying away from this technology. In fact, an Accenture study found that 77 per cent of insurance executives believe that AI is completely changing the computing process.

Canada’s Manulife customers, for example, are able to use their voice as their password to access accounts. Meanwhile, U.S.-based GEICO has a virtual assistant named Kate, who understands natural language and intuitively answers basic insurance questions.

Kanetix Ltd. has also embraced the technology, and recently integrated with Google Home to make it even easier for consumers to compare insurance quotes and mortgage rates through its websites: Kanetix.ca, InsuranceHotline.com, and RateSupermarket.ca. Launched in time for its release in Canada, Kanetix’s team of developers harnessed the AI power of Google Home to simplify shopping for insurance or mortgage rates. All you need to do now is ask.

In the following video, I demonstrate how Google Home makes the customer experience infinitely faster and easier.  CLICK HERE

Voice assistants are the renaissance of customer experience, and it’s an exciting time to take personalization to a whole new level of ease and perfection.

Editor’s Note:

As President & CEO, Andrew Lo leads all digital innovation and operations for Kanetix Ltd., Canada’s largest digital customer acquisition platform for insurance and financial services.

He is also a Business Strategy Advisor for Ryerson University’s DMZ helping to develop digital entrepreneurs and startup companies at the #1 University Incubator in North America and #3 in the world.

Andrew has 25 years of experience as a business, technology and digital leader for FinTech companies such as Filogix and D+H, and has developed organizations from startups into industry shaping ventures with over 5,000 employees.