Capital One has entered the chatbot marketplace today, announcing the launch of its very own banking bot, Eno.
According to the bank, Eno uses artificial intelligence or natural language processing to interpret a user’s texts, allowing those users to (of course) check their balances, the amount of credit they have left, their transaction and payment histories, set due dates for their bills, and pay their Capital One credit cards.
Eno’s text-processing skills also extend to the use of emojis; users can confirm a payment through a “thumbs up” or complete other actions in this way.
At the moment, users can only use a small sampling of emojis, which is to be expected, since the bank is testing out Eno with just a small sampling of customers.
Presently, users can’t just up and download the bot—it’s an app separate from CapOne’s other mobile apps, and there’s a wait list. A pool of lucky customers, who decide to join that list, will become members of the “pilot” group. Currently there is no word yet on how big that group is or isn’t, or even if the bank has started issuing invitations to connect with Eno.
While it seems as though Eno’s original testers will be getting a “barebones” version of the bot, the company has stated its intention to update the bot with more robust features, including money transfer. Bank of America’s bot Erica, for instance, will debut this year with P2P and bill split functions.
According to the bank, money transfer is currently not included in the bot’s “starting lineup,” but is in development alongside other tools and services.
Whether that will include voice functionality is anyone’s guess; at the moment users can interact with Eno purely through SMS. For those CapOne customers that prefer voice interaction, the bank still has its skill on Amazon’s Alexa.