Merrill Lynch has added speech recognition technology from Nuance to the interactive voice response (IVR) system of its 401(k) employee benefit plan recordkeeping service.
Clients can use the service to ask for balances, real-time quotes, change their savings rate and investment direction, reallocate current portfolio assets, model account-value growth and check fund performance.
The enhanced system eliminates the need to manually enter investment codes, allowing the participant to speak the name of an investment option, says the US investment bank.