Voice Services for Shopping: Cloud-Based Search Support

AI Shopping Assistants: Humans and chatbots may not be able to tell each other apart in the future

You will soon come across it if you haven’t already. Several supermarkets offer voice-enabled shopping services to customers, for example. Walmart shoppers in the US will be able to ask Google Assistant to add certain items to their virtual shopping trolley and to learn from their shopping habits.

Google has similar partnerships with two other supermarket giants – Target in the US and Carrefour in France. While Amazon offers voice-enabled shopping to Ocado customers in the UK. Not to be outdone, Walmart purchased conversation-commerce specialist Botmock recently to expand its services in this field.

Approximately a billion people already use text messaging or voice-based conversational tools to interact with businesses. Conversational commerce is expected to generate total sales of US$41 billion (£30 billion) by the end of 2021. And grow fivefold to nearly US$300 billion by 2025 – half of which will come from chatbots. Then how are these markets developing, and how does this impact our buying habits?

Now let us see the latest news of online voice shopping services:

Voice shopping will be available on Amazon in Hindi in the coming weeks

As part of its regional language offering, Amazon India announced the launch of voice shopping in Hindi. Amazon has also announced that customers can now access its website in Marathi and Bengali, added to 5 available languages. Previously available languages were Hindi, English, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu.

In a statement, Amazon India said, “These launches break down language barriers and make e-commerce more accessible and convenient for millions of customers across India.”  Amazon collaborated with linguists to create a comprehensible user experience in Marathi and Bengali for its launch in those languages. According to the statement, the team chose commonly used words over perfectly translated ones to make the shopping experience authentic, easy to understand, and delightful for customers.

Amazon customers can choose their preferred language across Android and iOS apps, mobile sites, and desktop sites.

The language preferences can be saved so they can access them again when they return. Following the launch of Voice shopping in English in 2020, Voice shopping will be available in Hindi. When the feature is launched, customers will be able to ask their voice for help finding products in Hindi and checking the status of their orders. 

Only Android devices will support the voice feature. In this launch, customers will be able to navigate to various touchpoints within the Amazon Android app, search for products, add items to their cart, and do many other things using their voice in Hindi or English.

“Our goal is to make e-commerce accessible, relevant, and convenient for customers by offering regional language shopping experiences. Amazon India Director (Customer Experience and Marketing) Kishore Thota said 90 percent of the customers from tier II and below cities visit Amazon in regional languages every month. Customers in Marathi and Bengali can now shop on Amazon this festive season.

The adoption of voice shopping by Amazon.in customers to fulfill their shopping needs has grown by 2X year over year since the launch of voice shopping in 2020. To make our customers’ shopping experience exciting and fulfilling, we will continue to provide new voice-based features,” Thota said.

The company has been innovating to provide customers and businesses with digital experiences by localizing its offerings in the areas of regional language, voice, and video. Since June 2020, Amazon.in has offered seller registration and account management services in languages including Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, Malayalam, and Bengali. The Amazon Alexa voice service – which powers the Echo range of smart speakers – is available in English and Hindi and can understand proper nouns in several languages including Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, etc.

There are titles available in the below languages on Amazon Prime video.

• Hindi,
• English,
• Marathi,
• Telugu,
• Tamil,
• Malayalam,
• Kannada,
• Marathi,
• Gujarati,
• Punjabi, and
• Bengali

Furthermore, through Kindle Direct Publishing, authors can self-publish their work in five Indian languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, and Gujarati, in addition to English.

Please visit our managed voice services page for more information on cloud-based voice services or to request a demo/quote.