The ‘VoiceIt’ beat 17 teams to become the best team to win the Re: Code Nigeria competition taking home ₦1.5 million ($5K), 6 months access to IBM Watson supercpmpouter APIs and 1 month free usage of Azure and MSDN.
VoiceIt allows customers carry out banking transactions via voice. Customers simply need to tap a button, speak into the application and tell it what transaction they want to carry out. For example, a bank transfer can be initiated by tapping a button and making a request for the service. The same also goes for checking account balance, and recharging phone credit.
Held last weekend, the Re:Code Nigeria hackathon aimed at developing solutions and value added services, to improve the customer experience in the banking sector in Africa.
Some of the partners included Access bank, Flutterwave, IBM, Microsoft, Devcente rand a host of others.
The second place was taken by the Paysense team, with a bot nicknamed Victor. Victor is a smart payment bot that helps bank customers make payments and access financial advice very easily. It also helps create a customer profile by detailing their spending habits. This in turn, informs the bank when the customer wants to take a loan, and helps make better financial decisions based on their spending habits.
The third place team created ‘Fissit’, a financial assistance tool, to help users manage money, track expenses, and make payments. All these transactions can be done in whichever messenger the user chooses — Facebook Messenger, SMS, or Slack.
The winners got prize money of ₦1.5 million, ₦1 million and ₦500,000 respectively. They will all get 6 months access to IBM Bluemix including APIs that gives them access to the Watson supercomputer. From Microsoft, they got 1 month free usage of Azure and MSDN.
