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Audio ATMs...Then & Now

While still far from the norm, audio-enabled ATMs continue to pop up from coast to coast - and in Australia and other far corners of the world. But it all started with two ATMs.

May 7, 2002

While still far from the norm, audio-enabled ATMs continue to pop up from coast to coast - and in Australia and other far corners of the world. In addition to the largest financial institutions like Bank of America, Fleet, Wells Fargo and Bank One, smaller banks like Louisiana's Hibernia, Union Bank of California and Maine's Banknorth have joined the audio rollout.

But it all started with two ATMs. The first audio-enabled ATM deployment in the world was a project byNCRfor Canada'sRoyal Bankin 1997; the second came two years later when theSan Francisco Credit Unioninstalled aDiebold-designed "talking" machine.

At the time both just intended to add service for customers, but with pending revisions to the Americans With Disabilities Act expected to add a requirement for "talking" ATMs, more and more financial institutions are looking to those original two machines for inspiration.

Oh, Canada

In late 1996, the Canadian Human Rights Act, which included guidelines on providing equal accessibility for sight-impaired citizens, was being developed in Canada. This raised Royal Bank's interest in an audio-enabled ATM.

As early as the late 1980s, NCR had been developing audio technology -- although not necessarily for ATMs -- to use in product communications on its 5682 platform. So when Royal Bank said it wanted to deploy an audio-enabled ATM at a branch in Ottawa, NCR felt it had a bit of a head start.

 NCR set to work, only to find there were several specific issues to be tackled.

"Our audio terminals initially were developed for public broadcast," said Rob Evans, NCR's director of Industry Marketing, "so we had to decide how to convert it to private use."

Privacy was ensured by issuing portable headphones for clients to plug into the ATM when they prepared to make a transaction, a practice that is still being used for today's audio installations.

"Also, we had to determine how we would know when it's not working," Evans said. "By and large, the self-service community is made up largely of third-party products that are not engineered and manufactured by NCR. So we had to go outside to get the audio services, the software, everything we needed to make the machines talk."

NCR found a program it liked and integrated it, but in the time it took to get the software running, the engineers ran into more industry standards that didn't exist when NCR first started to tinker with audio services. For instance, since the user doesn't have a reboot and reset control, the program had to run 24/7.

NCR enlistedT-Base Communications, a company that also worked with Diebold in San Francisco, to provide the software.

While many audio programs, and many of today's talking ATMs, rely on WAV files for sound, NCR used what were originally called ATX files on an Antex sound card. Unfortunately, Antex, supplier of the sound card, went out of business. "That's the risk you run" when using third-party programs, Evans noted.

But the evolution led to a text-to-speech engine, which eliminates the need for pre-recorded audio files.

"You can have ASCII text and, using a text-to-speech engine, have a synthesizer form the words for the customers," Evans said. "That's a more elegant solution. That technology has gotten better as time has gone on."

The visually impaired have grown accustomed to text-to-speech solutions, Evans said. "While it sounds kind of unnatural to a casual observer, to someone who has relied on this technology for years and years it is very natural. It matches the user's expectations."

Tweaking the technology

To help refine the development, Royal Bank consulted the people who would be using the machine. Ted Murphy, Royal Bank's manager of Hardware and Network Solutions, was involved in that process.

"There's a lot more to use of services than getting the program on the bank machine," Murphy said. One of the first things Royal Bank learned is that people with impaired vision use a variety of different ways to gather information.

"For instance, the later in years people lose their sight, the less likely it is they will be a Braille user," Murphy said.

Royal Bank established an 800 number to give clients a brief description of the layout of the machine -- an important facet of the overall process. "If you walk up and can't find the audio jack, it doesn't work that well," Murphy said.

Another desired option was to give visually impaired users the ability to blank the screen to make sure someone was not looking over their shoulders. At first, Royal Bank balked at that option.

"For branding, we wanted to at least have our color of blue," Murphy said. "But a segment of blind people actually are very sensitive to certain spectrums of light. To (one of the people the bank consulted), that blue screen was like shining a flashlight in his eyes. There are little subtle things you never know unless you engage people."

Once the technology and methodologies were finally in place, NCR configured an existing machine, a 5675 ATM which originally came out in the early 1990s.

Integrating the ATM into the network was relatively easy, Evans said, because Canada has a single network,Interac.In the United States, however, the technology must work with a number of networks.

"I think it's a pretty common misconception is there is one big ATM computer in the sky that controls all of them," Evans said, "but that's not the case. Many are built on technologies that are 30 years old."

More talk

Five years later, that initial machine is still in place and in use. Royal Bank doesn't track the number of transactions by sight-impaired customers, but the bank's network average per machine is 10,000 transactions per month. So it is doubtless seeing its share of traffic by users of all kinds.

Another 14 audio-enabled machines have been added, and Murphy said plans are in place to begin rolling out 250 more this year. Amazingly, no significant changes or upgrades have been made to the original design -- largely because not long after the initial machine went into public use, the Canadian Standards Association began to work on guidelines and standards for bank machine accessibility. The audio component was part of that standard, and Royal Bank played a key role in the development process.

"I'm pleased to say that our adoption and application of the audio component was basically accepted as the de facto standard," Murphy said. "We didn't have to change anything."

Plus, Royal Bank -- and the rest of the world -- learned that the use of these machines actually goes beyond the blind. Senior citizens who have trouble reading ATM screens use the audio technology, and occasionally people who might not be able to read a specific language can understand it orally. The technology works for them as well.

The bank has garnered numerous awards for the ATM. In 1998 it won both the Society of Office Automation Professionals award for Best Information Technology Initiative Resulting in Positive Social or Community Advancement and the Canadian National Institute for the Blind's Trillium Award for Improving Accessibility for Blind Persons. And in 1999, the machine received an Excellence in Access Partnership Award from the American Association of Engineering Societies.

More than anything, the Royal Bank project started the ball rolling for the audio-enabled ATM rollouts that are occurring today -- and it also had an impact on the development of the San Francisco Credit Union machine that would become the first audio-enabled ATM in the United States in 1999.

Audio in the U.S.

The San Francisco Credit Union's bid to place an ATM at City Hall was met with a request to make that machine accessible to the sight impaired -- which led to the first publicly deployed machine of its type in the U.S. When research began on how to audio enable an ATM, the credit union went to the best source it could find.

"Unfortunately no one in the U.S. manufactured that type of machine," said Louisa Tong, Electronic Processing Center manager for the credit union. "We tried to go beyond the U.S. market and found there was a talking ATM in Canada, so we talked to Royal Bank and asked how they implemented their system."

After consulting with Royal Bank, the SFCU went to its ATM provider, Diebold, which set out to audio enable one of its 1062ix machines. Diebold had been working on voice-guided solutions since the early 1990s that used circuit cards and a sound generator chip that allowed pre-recorded words to be chained together to create voice messages. That system evolved into one that uses a Windows platform and WAV files, which is what Diebold chose for the SFCU machine -- and what remains fairly standard in today's audio-enabled ATMs.

Alan Looney, director of Terminal Engineering for Diebold North America, said the toughest part was actually configuring the ATM for the user -- specifically scripting what the ATM would say.

"You have to figure out what it is you want to say and how to describe to a blind user how they can use that ATM," Looney said. "It involves scripting an orientation to the ATM, describing services offered at the ATM, as well as telling them where the card reader is, where the cash dispenser is, where the deposit envelope goes. It's an important exercise. It's one that has gotten easier to use over the years, but at that point there was quite a bit of a learning curve and it went through several iterations."

Once that was done, Diebold began working witheFunds, which processes transactions for SFCU's network, theCO-OP Network. One of the most difficult problems addressed by the two companies was how to provide audible results for a balance inquiry.

Diebold's John Wilbert and the San Francisco Credit Union's Louisa Tong were on hand for the unveiling of the first audio-enabled ATM in the U.S., at San Francisco's City Hall.

"Most other ATMs are much more predictable," Looney said. "Historically, in the U.S. and most places around the world, balance inquiries are generated by printing that amount on a receipt. Because the receipt format is not standardized, there was no way to pick that data out of the receipt. We had to create a new interaction between the host and the ATM to not only print it out but send it down to ATM to verbalize it."

"What we found is there needed to be a lot of coordination between both the eFunds group and our people," said John Wilbert, who serves as Diebold's sales leader on the project. "We needed to set up software files at the ATM and we also needed the network to set up certain files so that we could get balance info from the network. It was a group effort."

Wilbert said the lessons learned in that first deployment have made subsequent rollouts much easier and quicker.

Still talking

Tong said SFCU now has four audio-enabled machines, with a fifth on the way. The original City Hall machine generates roughly 2,000 transactions per month; SFCU doesn't break out audio-enabled transactions separately.

Transactions notwithstanding, the machine has served as a model for the typical talking machine in the United States, most of which use WAV files and a Windows platform and offer an audio tour through the ATM to help users find their way around the machine.

Since the October 1999 rollout of the City Hall machine, Tong said ATM keypads have been updated and orientation screening has been fine-tuned, which helps disabled users better understand how to use the machines.

While the forthcoming ADA regulations will more than likely require most or all ATMs to be audio-enabled, Tong said the local community, not federal regulators, was behind SFCU's decision to introduce voice technology. "San Francisco is very conscious about ADA issues," she said. "We were trying to accommodate any disabled people."

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