An AI Development to Listen to in 2018 – Voice Activated Shopping

“Alexa, Order Vega chocolate protein powder”,

“Alexa, Order a Leviton LED switch”

The above statements are not just the words, but they are the commands came out from user’s mouth. Readers, it’s voice-activated shopping! Till now, the customers used to take an advantage of voice assistants for listening to music, to check weather and much more. But the recent Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sale witnessed something extraordinary! The bestselling product happened to be Echo Dot home voice assistant this time! In 2018, the AI development based voice shopping has become a star of the show! Because the way its users are increasing rapidly, we can definitely say that the future of e-commerce drives via hands-free shopping!

Let’s dive deeper,

World’s leading giants have well-calculated predictions for voice shopping –

By the year 2020,

• Voice search will share half the part in all kinds of searching!

• 30% of search would be like without screen searches.

• 21.4 million Smart speakers will emerge in the USA.

• Voice Recognition Market will cross $601 million.

What’s The Current Status of Voice Activated Shopping?

12th October 2017, Target made a big announcement stating that its US-based customers can shop its products by using Google Express. Before that, the same kind of news came from Walmart on 22nd August 2017; it was too about Walmart’s collaboration with Google for its virtual assistant. In addition to that, it was about empowering customers to get benefit from an integration of Google’s shopping service and Walmart’s Easy Reorder! The behemoths want to take an advantage of AI development to deliver the best-personalized experience to their consumers.

Image: Amazon

All those collaborations came into existence after looking at Alexa’s growth rate! Alexa has made everything available over voice! Like I mentioned in the starting, you can ask for any product from the Amazon by just voicing the command! Alexa has gone further. Whirlpool consumers can control their appliances via devices empowered by Alexa. Moreover, the Johnnie walker customers can ask questions regarding various whiskeys and can also buy them. All of these things indicate towards personalized customer experience and the ways to capture it.

How can you leverage personalized experience via Voice Shopping?

More and more people are opting for voice-activated shopping because it’s easy, quick, and hands-free! A lot of research goes in to find out the customer preferences. The marketers always want to know how to approach customers with what and when. The advantage of the voice shopping is that it offers availability as per customer’s mood. The time has come to provide customer more personalized experience. But the question arises is that how to go? The following steps will provide you a correct guidance to design an AI development to leverage voice-activated shopping,

• Don’t look out for keywords. Instead, go for semantic search. So whatever content you write for the voice conversations, it should revolve around consumer sentiments, not keywords.

• It’s not necessary that every time user asks some questions. Some sentences and words mean that the user needs some info but doesn’t fit in the format. You have to work with a search engine to predict the user’s commands. Rather than the short keywords, come up with intent based long tail keywords that have chances to be recognized.

• Have a structured data and the schema markup connected with your website’s backend. This thing helps search engine to what kind of data you have and can crawl them in an apt way.

• Ensure that the voice you’re projecting as your representative must be a friendly one. The users should rely more on you then their friends. In case of product unavailability, the voice needs to be as apologizing and gentle to tempt the user to wait till the product stock arrives.

• Not only, it should be equipped with the product and its related content but it should also be equipped with general knowledge and sense of humor to entertain the user at its best and like I said before, it should give the user a friendly feeling.

Parting Thoughts,

Market giants have already implemented voice-activated shopping in their business and reaping benefits of it. Following that, medium enterprises are also planning to do so. It’s your turn now! Think what you can do to conquer the competition and the future both!