Month: March 2024

Asistente Inteligente de U.S. Bank has enabled Spanish-speaking clients to bank by voice in their preferred language.

Originally published on U.S. Bank company blog

Andres Malfavon has seen firsthand the power of being able to bank confidently in your own language.

As the branch manager in San Ysidro, California – just north of the Mexican border near Tijuana – many of the clients Malfavon serves speak Spanish as their preferred language. One of his favorite things he gets to do, Malfavon said, is show them how to use Asistente Inteligente, which broke new ground as America’s first Spanish-language voice assistant for banking.

With a simple tap of the microphone button, customers who set their language preference to Spanish in the U.S. Bank Mobile App can do dozens of things like check their balance and transactions, transfer and send money, track their credit score, lock and unlock their cards and so much more – just by talking to their smartphone in Spanish. They can also text instead of talk if they prefer.

“They are in awe,” Malfavon said. “That’s how I would describe their reaction. The idea of not needing to call and speak to a translator, but instead being able to open your phone, see everything in your own language, ask a question and – boom – get a response right away, it’s invaluable.”

Malfavon’s experience is far from unique. Since launching in April 2022, Asistente Inteligente has made it easier for Spanish-speaking clients all across America to do their banking digitally in their language of choice. In fact, more than half of the bank’s Spanish-preferring clients have already used it. That includes more than 45% in the past year alone.

“It’s an amazing level of adoption,” said Richard Weeks, head of conversational experiences and capabilities at U.S. Bank. “But at the same time, it’s not entirely surprising to us considering the type of feedback we’ve been getting from clients – frankly, they love it. It’s extremely gratifying to know you’re having that kind of impact on someone’s financial wellbeing and independence.”

Like the experience Aura Rodriguez had with a client at her branch in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“I was helping a Spanish-speaking client who was not comfortable with technology,” Rodriguez said. “So we spent almost two hours together as I showed him digital features that could help him in the future. He was so relieved when I showed him Asistente Inteligente. He said, ‘Oh this will be my go-to feature.’ When I followed up a few weeks later, he right away told me how much it has helped him. And he loved our interaction so much that he’s already referred two Spanish-speaking customers to me. Educating and empowering our clients is my top priority and I love my career because I get to do that every single day.”

Getting it right

Asistente Inteligente is the bank’s Spanish language version of its best-in-class Smart Assistant in the U.S. Bank Mobile App. Smart Assistant is one of just two banking voice assistants awarded Corporate Insight’s highest rating of “Excellent,” and Asistente Inteligente launched with all the same features and functionality as the popular English language version.

Getting all that functionality to translate correctly – without errors in terminology, nuances, tone and nomenclature – is something the bank took great care to get right.

The project team of U.S. Bank experience designers, developers and software engineers included several native Spanish speakers. Then, Hispanic employees in the U.S. Bank Nosotros Latinos Business Resource Group helped test it, to ensure customers always experience the proper language usage in its proper context.

“The idea of not needing to call and speak to a translator, but instead being able to open your phone, see everything in your own language, ask a question and – boom – get a response right away, it’s invaluable.”

-Andres Malfavon, U.S. Bank branch manager

“There are so many words that have more than one meaning, or that mean different things in different dialects,” Weeks said. “So it was really important to have a human element to the design, to ensure that when a client asks about their ‘balance,’ for instance, they get an answer about the amount of money in their account, not whether they’re about to fall over. There are limitations in the popular translation apps that we were able to solve for.”

Increasing access to empower clients

Asistente Inteligente was created to fill a need: increasing access to best-in-class financial services, via digital tools that make it easy and simple. It’s part of the bank’s broader effort to provide leading Spanish-language digital capabilities to Hispanic clients.

The U.S. Bank Mobile App has been available in Spanish for several years, along with Online Banking, ATMs and other ways to bank in Spanish. But adding a best-in-class voice assistant takes things to another level entirely, Malfavon says.

“It’s a gamechanger,” he said. “For our clients, it’s very empowering to be able to do things themselves. And that’s what we are striving for.”

Getting to be a part of that process – of educating and guiding clients in how to use these digital tools – is something that makes Malfavon and his team feel really good about coming to work every day.

“A lot of our conversations with clients are in Spanish. We are the closest U.S Bank branch to Mexico, and a lot of our clients actually cross the border to do their banking,” Malfavon said. “So it’s really important to us to show them our digital offerings, which can save them a trip and make things easy for them. When we have these interactions, it’s definitely a proud moment for our team. U.S. Bank is committed to these clients, and my team has a real sense of pride in knowing we have all these capabilities we can offer them.”

EMERYVILLE, Calif., March 7, 2024 /3BL/ – SCS Standards, a non-profit standard setting body is pleased to announce the publication of the final version 1-0 of the SCS-007-1 Certification Standard for Sustainability Rated Diamonds. SCS-007-1 is the first comprehensive, multi-stakeholder sustainability standard developed for the gemstone-quality diamonds, both natural and laboratory-grown. The standard was first introduced in 2020 under “trial use” status. It has been used in the marketplace by dozens of industry stakeholders since, resulting in this final version. Updates in the final version of the standard include:

Tiered indicators to incentivize continuous improvementRevisions to melee requirementsUpdates to criteria related to origin traceability and sustainable productionUpdates to climate related criteriaFormat changes for greater clarity

The certification program provides jewelry manufacturers, retailers, and their customers unparalleled transparency and due diligence around the environmental and ethical performance of diamond producers and handlers. In addition, it provides the highest level of diamond origin traceability assurance. Finally, it incorporates quantitative metrics to ensure that producers move rapidly toward achieving a net zero carbon footprint and reducing their life cycle impacts.

“The level of stakeholder engagement and learnings gained over the course of the trial use period proved invaluable to the development of version 1.0,” states Victoria Norman, Executive Director of SCS Standards, who led the multi-stakeholder standard development process.

SCS Global Services, a global leader in third-party certification of environmental, social, safety and quality performance, has been certifying diamond producers, cutters, polishers, wholesalers, and retailers since 2020 using the trial use version of the standard. Since first introducing the certification program, SCS Global Services has certified eight laboratory-grown diamond producers, 12 diamond handlers, and 65 retailers in 14 countries where over 100,000 certified diamonds have been sold through more than 500 stores worldwide.

Industry veteran and SCS Global Services Sustainability Rated Diamond Program Director Kat Weymouth says, “The growth of the program, at all levels of the industry, supports what consumers are demanding. They want to know that the diamonds they purchase are free of conflict and meet environmental, social and ethical standards.”

Diamond industry professionals interested in learning about the Sustainability Rated Diamond Certification program can learn more by visiting www.scsglobalservices.com. Click here to download a version of the final standard.

READ MORE

About SCS Global Services and SCS Standards Development

SCS Global Services is an internationally recognized leader in third-party certification of environmental and sustainability claims. Headquartered in Emeryville, California, SCS has representatives and affiliate offices throughout the Americas, Asia/Pacific, Europe and Africa. It is the certification arm of Scientific Certification Systems, Inc., a chartered benefit corporation. Additional information is available at www.scsglobalservices.com.

SCS Standards is a non-profit organization committed to the development of standards that advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Standards are developed in alignment with best practices and guidelines provided by internationally recognized bodies to ensure a robust, transparent, and collaborative approach. SCS Standards is the official standards development body for Scientific Certification Systems, Inc. For more information, visit www.SCSstandards.org.

Media Contact 
Stephanie Flynn 
sflynn@scsglobalservices.com

Originally published on Illumina News Center

The United Nations projects that the total human population will exceed 9 billion by 2040. Feeding that many people will demand advances in sustainable farming, especially in aquaculture. John Benzie, PhD, Karim Gharbi, PhD, and Tarang Mehta, PhD, recently spoke with Illumina about how their organizations are improving farmed tilapia through genomics, with the ultimate aim of improving aquaculture in the developing world.

WorldFish: Better aquaculture through selective breeding
Benzie is principal scientist at WorldFish, based in Penang, Malaysia. His organization works to transform aquatic food systems to reduce hunger, malnutrition, and poverty. One of their most groundbreaking achievements to date is the genetically improved farmed tilapia, or GIFT, a selectively bred strain of Nile tilapia introduced in 1988 that grows twice as fast as wild varieties and to a larger size.

Tilapia is the second-most-farmed fish in the world, after carp. It can be raised on small farms, and it’s an important source of protein, iron, potassium, and other nutrients for developing nations in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. Benzie explained that GIFT’s faster growth means a farmer can grow more fish in a shorter season, which could make all the difference in whether they turn a profit on their investment.

Keeping small-farm production both economically and environmentally sustainable is one of WorldFish’s primary interests. The organization makes GIFT’s germplasm available to research organizations or national governments that agree to use it responsibly, and by their estimations, today GIFT is farmed in 14 countries and constitutes fully half of the world’s tilapia production.

WorldFish continues to improve fish traits through their selective breeding programs, which primarily look for disease resistance and ability to withstand changes in temperature and salinity.

Benzie described how these programs work, step by step: “Every year we take out old fish from the previous generation. We make calculations based on the pedigree we have—we know how they’re all related to each other—and we use the best fish to breed the next generation.” They choose promising males and females to pair, incubate their eggs, and raise the newborn fish. “We keep each family separate so we know who is who—who the parents were—and we then take these fish at three months of age, and put in a little microtransponder so we can identify each individual fish.” Then the fish are moved to a bigger tank once they reach adulthood, and the process starts over again.

Decisions about which pairs to breed can be made significantly faster, and more accurately, if they know their fish’s genetic information—and they’ve found just the right partner to unlock this knowledge.

The Earlham Institute: Finding the right genes for the job
The Earlham Institute is a life science research hub in Norwich, England, that uses genomics to decode the scale and complexity of living systems. Karim Gharbi, its head of Genomics Pipelines, researched genetic markers in fish for his PhD—he credits his career to a lifelong fascination with the documentaries of Jacques Cousteau.

His colleague Tarang Mehta is a postdoctoral researcher seeking to understand the basis of gene regulation in fish, specifically how some genes are linked to better salinity adaptation in certain tilapia species but not others. He hopes that, with sufficient genomic information, WorldFish could breed tolerance to fluctuating salinity into species that are farmed in developing countries.

The Earlham Institute isolates their DNA samples from tiny pieces of fin collected from live fish across the world and sequences them using the Illumina NovaSeq X Plus System. Then, by analyzing the generated data, they can identify genetic markers that express desirable traits.

Among those traits, disease resistance may be the most critical—tilapia lake virus alone is responsible for up to 90% of tilapia mortality worldwide. “Once we have a disease developing in a particular farming industry like aquaculture,” Gharbi said, “this can start spreading from farm to farm, and every outbreak event is a loss to the farmer. The faster we can help farmers grow fish less susceptible to disease, the less income they will lose.”

Having access to an animal’s genome is a breakthrough that changes how organizations like WorldFish can operate: Previously, breeders had to directly expose fish to a virus in order to select individuals who showed better resistance to it. Now they can avoid this step, arriving at answers faster and without causing unnecessary harm.

The NovaSeq X Series: Fast, accurate, and sustainable
The Earlham Institute serves many users in the UK and beyond who depend on them to generate high-quality data quickly, affordably, and sustainably, and Gharbi and Mehta both attest to the NovaSeq X Series’ strengths in that arena.

Under optimal conditions, Gharbi said, they can receive samples from WorldFish and return results within five days. And in a recent evaluation of the institute’s “green impact,” the NovaSeq X Series’ sustainable reagents helped them demonstrate their efforts to reduce waste.

“The Illumina NovaSeq X is a cutting-edge technology,” Mehta added, “which allowed us both the speed and scale to sequence some of the things that we require with regards to genome sequencing, transcriptome sequencing, and epigenetic sequencing.” Taking multiomic approaches gives them more power to apply their findings to their mission of improving food security.

As he spoke about the institute, Mehta reinforced time and again how important it is to him to translate the work they’re doing at the genomic level directly into sustaining food biodiversity. “In a rapidly changing world, where disease is not going to wait for us and a changing environment is not going to wait for us,” he said, “it’s important for us to have not only just the speed, but also the scale of data quickly—for us to translate these findings to then move quickly back into the field to better inform genomic selection breeding programs.”

Fish can drown

It might sound counterintuitive, but fish can actually suffocate if there isn’t enough oxygen in their water. Benzie explained that many farmers in WorldFish’s areas of concern lack the means to aerate their ponds at night—when the algae present stop photosynthesizing oxygen, but the fish are still consuming it. Then, oxygen levels can fall so low overnight that the fish can drown. “Farmers, in order to avoid that effect, stock about half the amount that you would stock if you could aerate,” he said. This creates an unfortunate cycle: Less stock means lower profits, and even less chance to upgrade farm infrastructure to accommodate more fish. One piece of the solution, then, is fish that are bred to tolerate lower oxygen levels.

Keysight China recently demonstrated its commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) through a series of engaging events held across major offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Chengdu. Themed “We Connect,” these events fostered a deeper understanding of DEI concepts among employees, enhancing cultural awareness and forging stronger cross-functional connections.

For more information on Keysight’s DEI initiatives, see https://www.keysight.com/us/en/about/diversity.