Voice Commerce is for Everyone

Are you leveraging Voice Commerce yet?  You should be.  In 2020, 35 million Americans made at least 1 purchase using a smart speaker, a fact referenced by Shilp Agarwal on podcast “This Week in Innovation.” Agarwal is Co-Founder and CEO of Blutag, a product where enterprises can create a voice assistant for their store in minutes.  We’ve also developed voice commerce apps with our Interplay low-code platform.

Voice applications now recognize 97% of all spoken words. 62% of smart speaker owners have purchased via voice.

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This episode is the 5th in the podcast’s Startups of NRF series, where hosts Jeff Roster, Advisory Council Member at GMU Center for Retail Transformation, and Brian Sathianathan, Co-Founder of Iterate.ai and Member at Forbes Technology Council, interview startups exhibiting at the National Retail Federation (NRF) in 2022.

Roster and Agarwal discussed the importance of voice commerce in retail. To hear more about Agarwal and Blutag, check out the podcast. Today, we’re going to take a hint from Agarwal and talk about how voice commerce and voice assistants are transforming ecommerce in 2022.

Why Voice Commerce?

With the rise of smart speakers such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, voice commerce skyrockets. People are already beginning to use their speakers to make retail purchases; in fact, 62% of smart speaker owners have already used their speakers for voice commerce. This number is only going to grow.

AI technologies have advanced to the point where voice assistants can replicate a store-shopping experience. According to Google search stats, in 2013, its AI technology recognized 77% of spoken words. Today, it can recognize 97%. This allows for voice assistants that can (mostly) understand what their customers are searching for.

But what’s the pull for it? First and foremost, convenience. No longer do customers have to wait in long lines at the mall to find what they’re looking for. It’s fast. It’s hands-free. Another advantage is that as AI progresses, voice assistants will act friendly and engaging to the customer, mimicking a genuine, personalized shopping experience.

Applying Voice Commerce to Your Enterprise

As Agarwal noted in the podcast, this technology is for everyone. Whether your enterprise sells 10 or 10 billion products a month, your enterprise can and should make use of this technology. The future is built on ease. Voice commerce is one way that customers’ lives will get easier. It’s essential to start now.  Shameless promotion: we’ve developed voice commerce flows in Interplay, our low-code application development platform.

However, despite the advantages of voice commerce, we’d be remiss to not talk about some of the challenges. The main challenges as of now are speech pattern complexity and lack of trust. 

• Complexity: Though speech recognition is constantly improving, machines are still prone to error, and they may not understand context and accents. To combat this, be sure to train your voice assistant on huge volumes of data, especially specifically around your products. Remember, the voice assistant doesn’t need to know and understand every word in the dictionary, just those that will be pertinent to it.
• Trust: As for lack of trust, privacy concerns with any new technology are relevant. According to a 2019 Bloomberg study, 52% of voice assistant users worried that the assistants were listening to their private conversations. Trust takes time to build. As smart speakers become more conventional in our world, trust will naturally build. However, your enterprise can also take steps to reassure customers now. Some ideas include offering the consumer settings to disable voice recordings, enable it to only turn on with a certain word or command, setting a password, and so on.