The bank has already trialled the technology with 1,200 staff, where it handled queries from small businesses customers with problems such as lost corporate cards or forgotten pins.
Journalists' questions are either rerouted to communications staffers who provide inexpert, politically massaged responses, or the queries disappear in a bureaucratic maze, only to emerge well past deadline.
It gives researchers a testbed for studying how the data centers that process voice-enabled queries should evolve to keep up with escalating pressure from wearable gadgets.
