The steady progression and importance of artificial intelligence, machine learning,smart assistants, and Internet of Things capabilities into theconsumer experience and financial technology was apparent in threerecent announcements.

Tulsa, Okla.-based interactive and intelligent customerself-service solutions company ENACOMM, which provides financialservices companies with data analytics, machine learning, andnatural language processing announced a new reseller agreement withFoneLogix, an Atlanta-based provider of cloud-hosted VOIP phonesystems, solutions and support.

Through the partnership, FoneLogix's credit union and bankcustomers can take advantage of ENACOMM's VPA, a personal virtualassistant for financial institutions self-service users; and theENACOMM Financial Suite, which includes a hosted, interactive voiceresponse system for personalized customer interactions.

ENACOMM CEO Michael Boukadakis said. “We're excited forFoneLogix to help us make ENACOMM's best-in-class AI and biometrictechnology that powers conversational banking more widelyavailable, especially with the digital voice assistant channel setto grow exponentially over the next five years.”

Applying artificial intelligence, VPA works with widely-usedvirtual personal assistants, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home.Utilizing ENACOMM's hosted systems, a properly authenticated usercan safely handle banking transactions and gain access to theirfinancial accounts.

The ENACOMM Financial Suite provides a range of software tools,from voice biometrics to customer relationship management, as wellas added levels of security. ENACOMM's data-powered IVR solutionuses customer intelligence to direct calls and personalization, andprovides context preservation.

“Consumers are ready for conversational banking, as their rapidadoption of voice assistant devices and preferences regardingcustomer service channels show,” Mitchell Bridges, FoneLogixPrincipal and VP Sales & Marketing said.

Another update, Atlanta-based fintech firm VSoft, announcedseveral new enhancements to its product suite. They include naturallanguage processing for its digital banking platform, Arya, whichpowers the platform's live chat functionalities by consolidatinginput channels to enable a comprehensive cross-platform responseset. This allows credit unions and banks to engage with accountholders via multiple channels such as chatbots, SMS, FacebookMessenger or smart assistants.

VSoft also updated CoreSoft, the company's core processingsystem, to permit the system to run using HTML and the latestAngular technology, an open-source front-end web applicationframework; and added new archive and research capabilities for itsOnView payments products, which now support the retrieval ofprocessed ACH transactions. VSoft also announced that soon OnViewwill support the retrieval of wire transfers and real-timepayments.

“VISION is our opportunity to highlight the latest featurefunctionality in the VSoft product suite and showcase what's nextfor our company,” Murthy Veeraghanta, chairman and CEO of VSoftsaid.

Melbourne, Fla.-based NXT-ID announced it received a U.S. patententitled “Distributed Method and System to Improve CollaborationServices Across Multiple Devices.” The patent introduces theconcept of collaborative services across multiple devices toutilize common data or algorithms to recognize and authenticate auser for purposes of performing a variety of actions across manydevices. It enables devices without specific authenticationhardware or software components to leverage the capabilities ofnearby devices or contribute by sending data to an authenticationservice.

“This technology improves the security and operation of the IoTby enabling multiple devices to work together to improve accuracyand convenience,” David Tunnell, CTO of NXT-ID articulated. “Now,instead of simply authenticating with a single device, multipledevices may work together to identify and authenticate users.”

Tunnell added, this introduces numerous possibilities forcollaborative services in the future as the IoT grows. “Beyondauthentication, these collaborative services can include jointlyperforming tasks or jointly providing services to the user.”