- Amazon and Ally Bank have announced a new personal finance feature for Alexa-enabled products.
- Ally Bank customers can now ask their Amazon Alexa device to calculate how many hours they need to work to afford a purchase.
- It’s an easy way to decide whether a purchase is worth the amount of time it takes to earn.
Amazon’s Alexa technology is getting smarter by the day.
Ally Bank customers can now ask their Amazon Alexa-enabled device to calculate how many working hours it will take to afford a purchase, the bank announced this week.
Here’s the typical exchange:
User: "Alexa, open Ally and tell me how much a $1,000 bike will cost in CurrenSee?"
Alexa: "Okay. How much do you make in a year?"
User: "$75,000."
Alexa: "Thanks. How many hours do you work in a week?"
User: "40 hours."
Alexa: "Okay a $1,000 bike will cost you 27.73 hours of work."
Identifying the number of work hours it takes to afford a purchase, whether a $100 pair of shoes or a $3,000 vacation, is an easy strategy for deciding whether an item or experience is worth buying.
The new feature, called CurrenSee, is the latest personal finance capability in a series of skills offered by Ally Bank. On Amazon Echo products, Ally customers can already access everyday banking tasks, like monitoring account balances and recent transactions and deposits, transferring money, and checking current interest rates.
Other banks have introduced similar capabilities, such as "Ask UBS," which allows customers to ask their Alexa-enabled device questions such as, "How is the US economy doing?"
Ally Bank was rated the best bank on the internet and the best bank for millennials in 2017 by Kiplinger, a personal finance and business forecasting resource.
Amazon Alexa-enabled devices that feature Ally’s new skill include the Echo Dot, which retails for $50, and the Echo, which starts at $100.
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