You can talk to Lucie Money as well as type. All you have to do is tap the microphone and say your piece, and the words appear in the box, ready to send.
Sounds simple. It’s been around for ages. Everybody knows how dictation works. I have friends who never type into their phones but constantly talk at them. Believe me, I know.
But actually, it’s not that simple.
Speech-to-text is very good these days at ordinary words. But names are another matter. Say “Lucie” and, out of the box, most dictation systems will write “Lucy” (which is a little awkward when that’s the name of your own app). The two sound exactly the same, so these systems tend to write the more common spelling. And that’s fair enough. Until it isn’t.
And it’s not fair enough, nor anywhere near good enough, in a money app, because a lot of questions are about things with names: people, merchants, billers, etc. How much did I send my sister last month, or when did I last pay the plumber? Ask by name, and whether they’re a Steven or a Stephen, a Catherine or a Katherine, you’ll get the common spelling, whichever one you actually meant.
Lucie is designed to find the right person for the answer anyway. But nobody wants to see their sister’s name spelled wrong in their own question, every time they ask it. So in designing our dictation system we had to overcome this.
The starting point has been a surprisingly simple idea: the right spelling of the people you pay (or pay you) is already in your own bank records. For instance, someone I pay regularly is called Giuliana; the dictation system would always type this as Juliana. But my payments already say Giuliana, so that’s what Lucie should write.
A simple idea. But the journey to making it reality has not been easy. It can still get some names wrong. If you pay a Lucie and you’re asking about a different Lucy, you might sometimes get Lucie, or vice versa (which is frustrating in an app called Lucie where the dictation sometimes still makes it come out as Lucy) but it’s much better now and I attest to the fact that it writes Giuliana.
Oh, and it also now writes “Woolies” rather than “Woolly’s“. For an Australian money app, that’s probably the more important fix.