In the race of adopting voice technology in banking Capital One is certainly taking the lead (with not too many competitors on the horizon, to be fair).

Microsoft unveiled the Cortana Skill Kit, a set of tools, which will allow developers to leverage Microsoft bots and create new Cortana implementations, at a San Francisco event yesterday. During a private preview, the company showed some of the early use cases, with a select pool of partners. Among them: Knowmail, which will be applying AI to address the email overload issue, among other things; Expedia, which published a bot to Skype to help users with bookings; a mobile service request platform TalkLocal, which will deploy voice technology for service bookings; and, of course, Capital One.

We showed how Capital One, the first financial services company to sign on to the platform, leveraged existing investments in voice technology to enable customers to efficiently manage their money through a hands-free, natural language conversation with Cortana.

Earlier this year, CapOne and Amazon teamed up to put the Capital One “Skill” app on the Amazon Echo, allowing customers who have the Echo or Echo Dot (anything with Alexa) access their bank accounts using their voice. Even an Amazon spokesman admitted that CapOne is “early to the game,” although other banking giants, such as Wells Fargo, have been quoted saying that they are looking into the potential uses of voice technology and virtual assistants.

In the meanwhile, other sectors, such as retail (see Starbucks) or even hotels, are already coming out with more advance applications.

I am very excited to announce the biggest news yet for #VoiceFirst + #VoiceCommerce.

Every Wynn Las Vegas room!https://t.co/zNG96oQ7ta

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) December 14, 2016

Brian Roemmele, CEO and founder of Payfinders, told BI previously that the development of the technology will only accelerate next year. “2017 will make 2016–which was really the convergence point of artificial intelligence, machine learning, voice interactivity–look like slow motion,” he said.