Are You Ready For Voice Shopping?

Blog post author
Andreas Hassellöf
May 4, 2018

Talking to our virtual assistants is almost like science fiction. We just love the idea of literally telling them what to do. We don't have to bother with a keyboard or a touch screen, we just get to order them around like our electronic servants. The technology isn’t new - we’ve had simple voice interfaces for decades, allowing us to give basic commands or dictate documents. But in the last few years, voice has taken a huge leap forward.

Google Home, Alexa, Siri, and Cortana have begun to make the transition towards true AI, to a point where they're not just executing set commands, but they actually understand what they’re being told. You can ask them questions, and they'll do their best to answer.


But it’s still early days, and the tech still has a long way to go. We talked to users in both the UK and the US who had tried voice shopping. We weren’t entirely surprised by the range of reactions. We heard everything from “it was a disaster,” and “it’s horrible, I turned it off” to, “I love it,” and “we use it all the time.” The most common reaction was simply, “I don’t see the point.”

So why does it work well for some people and not for others? The reason wasn’t, as we initially expected to find, that the tech geeks loved it and the rest didn’t. At this point, almost everyone who has Alexa is an early adopter, so they’re all geeks to some extent. In fact, the most vehement negative reactions often came from the most tech-savvy users. The Americans definitely loved it more than the British, but that still doesn’t explain the range of reactions we saw.


Layers of technology

To understand why this is, we need to look a little deeper into how voice shopping actually works. It’s a massively complicated problem to solve, requiring many different layers of technology and AI.


As if that wasn’t enough, an effective voice-controlled AI needs to be able to operate in a noisy environment. There may be music playing, a TV show in the background, a washing machine running, dogs barking, and traffic rumbling outside. It has to be able to tune all that out and pick up the relevant sounds that make up speech. To add extra complication, it needs to know that the character on the TV who just spoke to their AI isn't real.



The system doesn’t work effectively until it has a lot of data about your shopping habits and preferences - until it gets the information it needs, it has to keep asking you a lot of questions to reach the right level of detail, which is considerably slower and more frustrating than shopping via web or mobile.


The learning curve goes two ways.



Where voice hits a real limitation is that it’s really not good for browsing or comparison shopping. For one-off or complex purchases, the audio interface is inadequate.

You wouldn’t want to buy something like a sofa, a camera, clothes, or even a teddy bear without being able to see it, read reviews, and check the specifications. For that, you need a screen. That’ll doubtless happen in the next evolution: the AI will fire up the nearest screen or projection display and show you suggested items.



It's only a matter of time

However, here’s the bottom line.

AIs are like humans in one vitally important respect. They learn by failing. They listen to billions of words a day and gradually learn to understand us: look at how much voice input has improved since it became a standard feature on mobile devices. AIs undertake millions of shopping transactions and learn about what we really want. And, just like kids, they observe everything we do so that they can fit in with us better. Like kids, they do their best, they make mistakes, and we teach them to do better. Voice shopping may be limited and clunky now, but it won’t take long before it’s just another way to do business.



To gain widespread acceptance in the home, AIs will have to work for the benefit of the customers, not just be an agent for a single retailer.

A modified version of this article originally appeared on ITProPortal.

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