Fidelity Uses Speech Recognition To Provide Fund Performance Information

BOSTON--Fidelity Investments has latched on to the early stages of the mutual fund industry's adoption of speech recognition technology with its installation of a system supplied by Nuance Communications of Menlo Park, California. The Nuance 6 system went live on Monday, February 9 on the FundsNetwork program, the service that provides customers with information on 3,400 funds Fidelity markets for 330 fund companies, including itself.

"The whole purpose of this was to make it easier for people to use the service than it currently is with a touch-tone telephone," says Matthew Sadler, a senior vice president with Fidelity. "Previously, people had to punch as many as 10 keys on the telephone if they wanted information about a fund."

Funds typically have three- or four-letter ticker symbols, and each letter is represented by two keys on Fidelity's touch-tone system. Moreover, by the time a customer reaches the ticker symbol, they've already had to punch in their account number, another nine digits for their social security number and four or five more keys for their personal identification number, or PIN. The process is not only time consuming but also frustrating for the consumer.

"People got hung up on translating the ticker symbols into keys," Sadler says. "This system will be a lot faster for them."

The system is designed to recognize foreign and US regional accents. A Nuance spokesman says that the company's software uses a series of algorithms to translate human voices into SQL database commands. A low-end developer's toolkit for the Nuance system runs $3,000, but a large installation for a company like Fidelity or Charles Schwab, which is also a Nuance client, is more likely to cost between $500,000 and $1 million.

Nuance says the system can run on standard Intel Pentium servers running Microsoft's Windows NT operating system or Unix servers.

The FundsNetwork is the first group within Fidelity to use the speech technology, but Sadler expects it to be adopted by other divisions as the system proves itself.

Sadler expects Fidelity to add new services later this year, although he was not prepared to specify them.