Here's some background about the world's first two talking automatic
teller machines.  today, there are several thousand machines in thirty
states with more machines being added weekly if not daily.  This is from
an industry publication.  It should be pointed out that royal Bank was
prompted by the efforts of blind customer Chris Stark who filed a
complaint with the Human rights commission in Canada.  It is a fair
statement to say that Royal Bank did receive community input about the
talking atm <grin>.

Kelly


From atmmarketplace.com

Audio ATMs...Then & Now

by Kevin Gibson

. 06 May 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 by NCR for Canada's Royal Bank in 1997; the
second came two years later when the San Francisco Credit Union installed
a Diebold- 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.

"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."

Rob Evans director Industry Marketing, NCR

"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.

Also, the company that developed the software, T-Base Communications,
went out of business. "That's the risk you run" when using third-party
programs, Evans noted.

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. 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 with eFunds, which processes
transactions for SFCU's network, the CO-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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