FMCG companies experiment with voice-recognition technologies.
With the market for virtual digital assistants/smart speakers growing at a fast pace, new opportunities are emerging for retailers and brands in the form of voice-activated shopping, according to data and analytics company GlobalData.
In a report, GlobalData said voice-activated shopping can make the shopping process faster and easier than conventional online shopping.
Voice-activated shopping is powered by virtual personal assistant devices or smart speakers with voice-recognition software.
Tom Vierhile, innovation insights director at GlobalData, said: “Voice-activated shopping is a huge leap for many companies. FMCG companies should experiment with voice-recognition technologies to begin to understand key challenges and figure out how they need to position their own products to win in this emerging genre.
Companies like Colgate-Palmolive and Moët Hennessy USA are already experimenting with the technology and it is a good bet that more will follow.”
Colgate on this year’s ‘Earth Day water conservation campaign’ used smart speakers whose owners can learn facts, conservation tips or hear the sound of running water by saying, “Hey Google, talk to Save Water by Colgate”. The campaign is also available with Amazon Alexa for users who say, “Alexa, enable Save Water.”
According to GlobalData’s Q3 2016 consumer survey, just 2% of consumers say they do most of their food shopping online. Voice-activated shopping may be able to chip away at the dominance of brick-and-mortar grocery stores and shift these numbers to online.
However, early research into the behavior of consumers using digital voice assistants has found a greater tendency to use them in private areas than in public spaces due to privacy concerns. This could limit future growth of voice-activated shopping.
Vierhile said: “Voice-activated shopping has a few peculiarities that FMCG companies should be aware of before jumping in. Voice search, which underscores all voice-activated shopping, is dramatically different than traditional web searching.”
Google is in talks with a range of companies in India to integrate its voice assistant service in consumer durable products,
In India, the shift to voice assistants is expected to be faster and more definite. For, most textual chatbots are in English, a language that under one-sixth of the country’s population is versed with. With voice assistants, combined with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, machines are learning to understand regional languages – especially the popular ones such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali.
These voice assistants are led by the popular ones Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, Siri of Apple, and Microsoft’s Cortana.
Accenture predicts 39% of India’s online population will use some kind of voice assistant by end of 2018. One more factor to keep in mind is that India tops in ‘Voice Searches’ – 28% in the world.