Bank of America is proud of its virtual assistant, Erica, which has 3.5 million users and 11 million transactions within three months of its launch, Michelle Moore, head of digital banking at BofA, said at the BAI Beacon conference in Orlando yesterday. But Erica still has a long way go.

“Customers are not comparing Erica to other banks’ virtual assistants,” Moore said. “No, they are comparing it to Amazon’s Alexa and Google.”

Erica, which was launched in limited capacity in March, completed its nationwide rollout in June. Currently, Erica can perform tasks like balance checks, provide insight on spend habits, make transfers, or connect the user to a human for customer service.

What Erica cannot do — that Moore said she and her team are working on — is “being able to reset a user’s PIN or a credit line increase.”

And on a broader scale, “we need to work through having Erica be able to answer the ‘why’ questions,” Moore said.

For example, she said, if a user asks why there’s a hold on their account, Erica’s current iteration is not able to answer that question. The goal is to get Erica to answer that question, and the other why questions.

Moore knows this because of customer feedback and data gathered from customer usage. Understanding customer usage patterns and customer behavior is crucial for improving and adding to Erica’s capabilities.

In fact, the bank’s team has already used such data to make improvements in Erica’s natural language processing abilities, but also to improve the feature’s overall UX.

For instance, the Erica icon, which appeared as a solid icon in the right lower concern of BofA’s mobile app, now becomes translucent so the user is not distracted by its constant presence when they are not using it.

“That came from listening to the way consumers felt,” she said.

The ultimate goal is not just to get Erica on par with Alexa or Google Assistant, but to make the feature so seamless and functional that the user doesn’t have to give a second thought when using Erica.

Bank of America, perhaps, hopes to do with Erica what USAA Bank did with remote check deposit, which when first introduced in 2009 was groundbreaking, and today is commonplace. In Moore’s words, Bank of America “deposits 2,000 branches worth of checks on the mobile device,” every month.

Bank of America currently has almost 26 million mobile users. Erica is currently available in English, but the bank is working on adding Spanish.

Customers can chat with Erica via instant messaging, through voice or touch.