Online shopping has become a popular trend. With a smart device, you can shop without leaving your house. It could be even more convenient when you shout out what you need and within a few days, your order arrives at your place. In this case, it doesn’t even require your hands to press any buttons. This way of shopping is termed as voice shopping, which indicates purchases made with smart speakers, and is possible now due to advances in speech recognition. With the rise of artificial intelligence and big data, the accuracy rate in speech recognition technique has improved and the technique is considered mature enough to permit its use as designed.
Currently, Amazon’s Alexa Voice Shopping provides a service that enables customers to make purchases and check orders with just voices through smart speakers, such as Amazon Echo. A recent market research by OC&C Strategy Consultants predicts a massive increase in voice shopping. The research estimates that the industry will grow from $2 billion today to $40 billion in 2022 driven by the growing popularity of smart speakers. However, according to the report of The Information, a digital media company, only two percent of Amazon Alexa owners have experienced voice shopping and among these people, more than 90% have only tried it once.
The fact that people are not used to voice shopping is obvious and is an example that the technology runs ahead of the business model. To be more specific, the speech recognition technology has changed the way to shop, but the changes are beyond people’s imagination. Therefore, besides providing products and services, companies have to enhance customers’ motivation in changing shopping ways and let customers feel the benefits of voice shopping to gain success in voice shopping industry, which are not an easy task. There’s still a long way to go before reaching $40 billion estimate.
References:
Sorry, Alexa – practically no one uses you to buy things from Amazon
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-reality-behind-voice-shopping-hype
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/alexa-voice-shopping-tutorial,news-25370.html
