NPCI is building voice bots for UPI Payments; to go live in a couple of months

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

NPCI) is building a voice bot based interactive system for Indian consumers to make payments via UPI. The system should go live in the next two to three months, two bankers in the know told ET. The idea is to build an Amazon Alexa type voice system into which payment apps and banks can integrate.

Consumers who have to undertake multiple steps to make payments via UPI will be able to just speak into the app. “NPCI is already building the process and it should go live by September or October. Third-party payment apps will have to integrate the ‘add on feature’ into their platforms,” said one of the bankers ET spoke to.

The Reserve Bank of India, in its monetary policy statement on Thursday, proposed the launch of conversational payments on UPI. This will be an AI-powered system through which consumers will be able to have a conversation and initiate and close a transaction. “This will certainly harness innovative capabilities and plug the gap to help create a convenient and easy-to-use payment system for users, resulting in a vast number of users coming to the digital platform,” said Pranay Jhaveri, managing director, South East Asia, Euronet.

Amazon Pay already supports voice based bill payments through Alexa commands. Now, if NPCI builds this system, it can become a use case across all UPI applications. Existing payment platforms will have to go live with this feature by adopting this update.