Bank Innovation first blogged on USAA’s budding mobile banking voice command functionality in July.  Today, the San Antonio-based bank revealed what technology is powering its voice command mobile banking pilot: Nina, a virtual assistant for mobile customer service apps, from Nuance Communication Inc.  Nuance provides voice and language for businesses and consumers worldwide.

Nina, who combines Nuance’s speech recognition, text-to-speech, voice biometrics and natural language understanding technology, comes with a software development kit. In it? Nina Banking Assistant, which has pre-designed templates and tasks for store location, bill pay, account information and more than 200 other banking related queries.

Though Nina is in pilot now with a limited group of members and employees at USAA, Neff Hudson, assistant vice president of emerging channels, told Bank Innovation last month that it won’t plunge into a full launch until early next year.

“We need to make sure it’s functional,” says Hudson, adding that there’s a fine line between “stupid computer” and “gee, that’s cool.”