Voice recognition: A new shopping experience

You’re at home craving for pizza and don’t have a pizza maker but you’re too tired to get up from your couch to buy. Good thing there’s online shopping where just a few clicks on a web or mobile browser is what it just takes to purchase it. Thought this was already easy? It can even be easier because all you need now is your voice and a smart device.

The biggest thing revolutionizing online shopping is currently voice recognition. Just speak and the smart device, such as a speaker, hub or mobile phone will order what you desire for you.

Here’s how voice recognition is changing the shopping experience:

Makes shopping convenient

As mentioned above it takes almost no effort at all to talk to a device to buy something online. Smart speakers today have various voice assistants you can choose from, including Alexa and Google, that understand hundreds or more speech commands. Smartphones have them, too, the only difference is that these are more portable than home speakers.

Reordering gets easy as well. Some smart devices are already capable of remembering your past orders. Say, if you have to buy something weekly or monthly, you don’t have to say much, just a simple phrase for reorder can do.

Gives tailored product recommendations

Did you know that emotions in voice can now be detected by some smart speakers? This capability is said to help devices understand customer or user behavior and give suggestions on what to order based on those.

For instance, if you have the blues, voice assistants in the near future can tell you to buy comfort food, buy a good music album, grab a ticket to a nice getaway and more. AI is really becoming more and more human, agree?

Allows for better communication

Prepare to say goodbye to the old feedback form. Buyers can now send voice responses to a product or service bought via a voice-enabled device.

Voice recognition allows for better and faster communication between the consumer and seller, as expected by Adweek. This speeds up the returning of malfunctioning purchases as well and prevents miscommunication. More can be expressed and clarified through voice than a written response. Voice seems to be the more natural way of conversation.

A verification method

This is starting to be studied and improved. Once voice recognition technology reaches maturity in the market, it may be a complementing method along face or spoken password recognition.

If voice assistants can be smarter to detect distinctive patterns in voice and know what a recorded voice is from the real one, then shopping will totally go handsfree.

With these shopping advantages it’s not impossible to see that the voice shopping trend will go bigger through the years, not just in the end-consumer market but also in sourcing. In fact, the voice-activated shopping market in the US is poised to be a $40 billion industry by 2022, per an article from the South China Morning Post. Consumers are embracing this technology very well. Even Google and Walmart have recently partnered with each other to bring voice shopping to more consumers.

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