On Oct. 1, 1999, the country’s first talking ATM opened for business at San Francisco City Hall. It was the 13th such machine in the entire world.
Ron Boutte has been blind since since he was 10, but he’s an old pro at using ATM machines. Boutte reads the Braille on the keypads and has memorized the sequence of buttons to press.
But cash is not always at Boutte’s fingertips. Unable to see the screen, the 44-year-old cannot tell if the machine is out of order or if an error occurs.
But for Boutte and other blind and visually impaired residents of San Francisco, a solution has arrived. The first talking ATM in the nation is now in the city treasurer and tax collector’s office in City Hall.
It can be found by following a talking sign, an infrared control that tells users where they are. The voice gets clearer as the person gets closer to the destination.
At the ATM, audio instructions come through a headset. A voice repeats which keys have been punched and will notify the customer when the transaction is completed or if it fails.
The machine was a modified Diebold built by T-Base Communications, which had built the other 12 talkers for the Royal Bank of Canada. It arrived after years of lobbying by California advocates for the blind, and came a few months after banking giant Wells Fargo announced plans to install talking ATMs throughout California. As blind advocate Lainey Feingold explains:
Blind community advocates laid the groundwork for talking ATMs in the 1980s and early 1990s, with important policy work on federal legislation and regulations. These advocates made strides with the banking industry, as well as by serving on standard-setting committees. Banks were first contacted using structured negotiations in the mid-1990s; by 1999, all of these efforts resulted in the first installed talking ATMs in the United States.
Three months before the first talking ATM was installed in the United States, Wells Fargo and the California Council of the Blind (CCB) announced a historic plan to install talking ATMs throughout the state.
One month after San Francisco’s talking ATM was up and running, CCB announced that Citibank had installed five talking ATMs in California. The announcement was the result of an agreement that CCB and individual CCB members had reached with the bank.
When 20 talking ATMs were installed at Wells Fargo locations in April 2000, Wells became the U.S. bank with the most talking ATMs in the country.
Bank of America was the first bank in the country to agree to install talking ATMs in more than one state. In March 2000, it announced a deal with CCB to develop a plan to install talking ATMs in California and Florida and said it would work out a plan for the rest of the country the following year.
In 2002, Citibank announced that it had installed the first talking ATMs in New York, and Wells Fargo announced state-wide plans for talking ATMs in Iowa.
Today, of course, nearly all ATMs can talk, and most are able to offer instructions in multiple languages. As with many such innovations, it turns out that talking ATMs are useful to everyone, not just blind people. Many ATMs use voice commands to get transactions started, reducing confusion and wasted time. Voices can make the ATM experience more enjoyable and interactive, saying “please” and “thank you” as the customer makes choices. Hearing the instructions also serves as a double-check to reading them, reducing errors.
And it all started with one machine in a government office in California, 10 years ago.
