Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) is touting a new milestone with its massive network of ATMs--more than 18,000 are now enabled with voice technology. Talking ATMs provide instructions in English or Spanish to the visually impaired. Each ATM (ATM news) has an audio jack that delivers spoken instructions through headsets.

The announcement brings to a head 10 years of activity. The bank was among the first to commit to talking ATMs. But this has hardly been the only change. Many ATMs are now equipped with deposit imaging technology, allowing people to feed checks and cash directly into an ATM slot. For cash, you can deposit up to 40 bills at a time and receive immediate credit if the transaction is made on a business day by 8 p.m.

Other banks are slowly upgrading their ATMs as well. The next big wave of innovation may be security-related. Skimming and malware have certainly got a lot of attention. ATM has embraced optical character recognition on some ATMs. There's also some talk of using biometrics as a security tool. NCR just announced a "fully weatherized," portable ATM that banks only need a power outlet to operate. Banks could easily deploy them at one-time events. 

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- here's a release

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