Fidelity Cora


By Christopher Robbins/ Financial Advisor

Meet Cora, your new financial assistant, who greets you as you enter a room filled with screens ready to show you the latest financial and investment charts.

The room has no seats and no doors, but a large window looks out into a tree-filled landscape, while giant screens cover three of the room’s walls.

“Show me a graph,” you ask her.

“Which stock?” Cora responds.

“Amazon,” you say.

“The stock’s symbol is AMZN and the stock name is Amazon.com, Inc. – is this the stock you want to quote?” Cora asks.

As you respond in the affirmative, Cora brings up Amazon’s chart on one of the room’s giant screens, giving you instant real-time access to information about the stock and dialoguing about the stock’s most recent closing price and performance.

But Cora isn’t real, she’s a virtual reality manifestation created as a proof of concept by Fidelity Labs, the research arm of Boston-based Fidelity, using technological infrastructure from Amazon Web Services called Amazon Sumerian.

Combining virtual reality with voice recognition creates a virtual financial assistant that looks like a 3D animation of a woman but responds to spoken questions in real time. Cora’s “virtual chart room” is also a digital artifice that users can interact with via virtual reality goggles.

“This is one of the first times that we’ve seen these two things, virtual reality and natural voice processing, combined together, and we’re looking to explore whether this use case really works,” said Adam Schouela, vice president of product management and emerging technology at Fidelity Labs. “The idea of being able to use natural language processing to ask natural questions and get back answers both in speech and visually [is] it increases the speed in which you can get the information and answers you’re looking for.”

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