What This Puppy Chatbot Says About The Friendly Future Of Fintech For Consumers

Intuit thinks this puppy will make finance more fun.

- Melissa Riofrio

This puppy chatbot is the most adorable example yet of the promise of fintech. Fintech is a blanket term for financial technologies.

Fintech ranges from the payment and banking apps many of us already use, to the AI and machine-learning applications that crunch transactional data for financial companies, to cryptocurrency, block chain, and other complete re-imaginings of how money works. In June, at Intuit’s Innovation Lab in San Francisco, the puppy was one of several experiments shown by the company’s developers that explore how consumers could experience fintech in their daily lives—and maybe have more fun with managing money.

A PUPPY (OR KITTEN) THAT CARES

The puppy chatbot, along with a kitten and some human-like characters, are an experiment in what Intuit called empathetic virtual assistants. Designed to present a friendly face for answering your financial questions, these chatbots can converse using natural language and express one of six emotions based on how you seem to be feeling when you call.