On Thursday, Germany’s Deutsche Kreditbank AG announced it has teamed up with FinReach to launch a new chatbot called Herbie. The company described Herbie as a customer assistant based on artificial intelligence that will accompany interested parties online on their way to a private loan. While sharing more details about Herbie, CEO of FinReach, Sascha Dewald stated:
“The special feature of Herbie is that he guides the course of the conversation on the basis of specific questions and recognizes a relevant product interest in real time. This is different from classic chatbots. In the first stage of development, he focuses on users who are interested in consumer credit or would like to receive more information. What was important was the close cooperation with the DKB, which supported us as a partner, in particular in the development of dialogues. “In addition, the development team made sure that visitors to the DKB website remain anonymous and that Herbie offers its dialogue Discreetly submitted: The assistant appears at the bottom right of the screen, instead of being asked to take over large parts of the display like traditional chatbots.”
Dewald noted that Herbie may be operated as intuitively as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. The bot also understands colloquial language and will oversee mistakes in spelling and grammar. He added that if the customer is satisfied with the quality of the information that Herbie provides, the chat forwards the customer directly into the application for a loan.