What it’s about
Sber launched Salute, a family of voice assistants. Colleagues set up a platform for us inside the banking app and then suggested we build our own “skills” — mini-features that live inside the chatbot.
Our tribe, personal finance management, was tasked with trying out the platform and opening a new traffic channel into our other services.
150,000 → 1,000,000
MAU
During my time working on the skills, we grew from 150,000 to 1,000,000 people.
Green light
Experiments → products
Some skills started out as mere experiments but grew into full-fledged products within the tribe.
What sets Salute apart is its range of assistant styles: pick whichever way of talking suits you.
Skills
The assistant has skills for transaction history, spending and income analysis, an overview of all your assets, managing recurring bills and subscriptions, help with claiming a tax deduction, and budgeting, plus integrations with external projects such as SberAuto.
Spending
Subscriptions
SberAuto
The skill is built on the canvas-app SDK, which opens a web-view page on top of the chat-app.
On this one, I acted as a mentor.
Cannibalization?
Why build SberBank Online inside SberBank Online? That’s an open question. At this stage, we’re competing for the same audience: people who need a financial assistant.
The ambition is to make the assistant truly personalized and proactive, but that takes enormous resources and work on that very same infrastructure. Given the choice between “build that assistant in a couple of years” and “ship small skills right now,” we went with the latter.
How’s it going
We spotted a user pattern. Lots of people open the assistant chat without any particular request, or simply misclick, and then throw random queries at it to see if they can trip it up. One of those queries is “how’s it going?”
The skill proved itself so well that the tribe decided to grow it into a full team and roll it out across all products. But that’s another story.
Bonus
