Nuance Communications Inc. has announced that Garanti Bank, one of the largest private banks in Turkey, is leveraging Nuance's Nina, the intelligent virtual assistant, to bring a human-like conversational interface to its iGaranti mobile banking app. 

Garanti Bank customers can now converse with the iGaranti virtual assistant using natural, conversational language to inquire about their account details, transfer funds, get exchange rates, buy/sell foreign currency and a host of other functions, instead of tapping their way through the app, according to the press release. For example, customers can say: "I need to send 500 Liras to Ali in my contact list today" then dictate a description for the money transfer. With iGaranti, customers can also find out more about nearby shopping or savings offers.

"iGaranti has been designed with Millennial users in mind and includes breakthrough innovations," said Didem Dinçer Başer, executive vice president, Garanti Bank. "At Garanti Bank, we strongly believe in the importance of voice-based services. iGaranti was the first banking project outside of the United States to utilize Nina Mobile from Nuance, and we are continually making efforts to improve the voice technology for future applications. We are getting closer to our goal of allowing a seamless end-to-end speech-enabled experience and we will continue to make investments into voice-based services for the upcoming years."