As e-commerce soars due to the lockdown, new supportive technologies and tools emerge, of which voice-related are picking up the most, especially as their use cases increase across different industries.
Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and go back to the plethora of scents of perfume shops, spas classic calming music, and the chocolate testers at bakeries catering to our human nature. Great memories are often multi-sensory engagements, or at least they were pre-COVID-19 times as brand experts proved the importance of engaging multiple senses in a retail experience. The higher the engagement, the more likely it is that you’ll get immersed in details, get disconnected for a few minutes from distractions, and ultimately, you will end up shopping and spending money.
However, as the majority of the world responds to the imposed lockdown by shopping online, humanity is realizing how their senses simplified their shopping experiences. How ordering significant quantities via their voice at the grocery or via a call in a few minutes is now replaced by several clicks across multiple pages. It was so much simpler to smell multiple scents at the same time to choose a gift. How relationships with sales agents allowed us to get the recently arrived vegetables or the freshly baked cake instead of the blank neutral screens we browse online today. Hence, it’s not just about the jargon on brand experience, engagement, and connection, that any marketer or brand expert can tell you about (not to discount that). It’s about simplicity.
Therefore, in pre-COVID-19 circumstances, we were more likely to shop online if you thought that the shopping experience would be simpler, faster, or easier in comparison to the brick and mortar experience. This is why certain customer segments, employees working longer hours, new moms, smaller families, were more likely to shop online. Building on this, new tools and forms were introduced to simplify the e-commerce experience, such as contactless payment cards for small items, voice shopping (Alexa, Google Home, etc.), AI-powered recommendations, and biometrics integration to enable quicker simpler checkouts. As e-commerce expenditure has been increasing, it seems that voice-related technologies will likely emerge with the highest growth and attention.
Pre-COVID-19 trend forecasts literature concluded that voice shopping via assistants such as Alexa would take another 4-5 years to pick up, because it was only being used for simple tasks like setting reminders, asking about temperature or at most for simple purchases such as their daily coffee from a few cafes such as Starbuck and Dunkin Donuts. In addition, surveys showed that people were still not comfortable using voice assistants for shopping that involved bigger ticket sizes.
However, more people are now relying on e-commerce voice assistants, highlighting their value, especially as to maximize the value of their previous tech purchases or decide to selectively invest in devices that will help them during their quarantine. This could be for playing music, speaking to their loved ones, and or multi-tasking (listen to the news while cooking, voice shopping while working, etc.). While this doesn’t guarantee that voice shopping will necessarily grow, owning the device is definitely the first step.
Moreover, Amazon and Apple have both trained their voices assistants Alexa and Siri to support the diagnosis of COVID-19 through asking a series of questions on travel history, symptoms, and then linking them to the national health services. Technology companies and researchers are looking into ways to leverage voice for early diagnosis. The app Coughvid, developed by researchers at EPFL’s Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL), can record your cough on the phone to find out whether you might have COVID-19.
This is likely to highlight the variety of uses for voice-assistants and how it will be further integrated into new industries. China has been actively using voice assistants during the lockdown to make auto calls to check on patients, asking them several questions during their quarantine and for post-treatment conditions. Additional uses of voice assistants have also emerged in the field of insurance-tech and education-tech.
Furthermore, voice is a safe option to return to once the spread of COVID-19 is contained. Shopping malls and stores will not return to the old normal, but rather the new normal, which will most likely involve less touch. Tech companies across the world are putting their heads together to design germ-free stores, hands-free elevators, parking tokens, and much more. It clearly seems that ‘voice’ will play a stronger role in every brand’s multi-sensory engagements to connect with their consumers in a post a COVID-19 era.
References:
- https://connectedworld.com/the-future-of-voice-assistants/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckswoboda/2020/04/06/covid-19-is-making-alexa-and-siri-a-hands-free-necessity/#5fa47e2e1fa7
- https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/04/shopping-via-smart-speakers-is-not-taking-off-report-suggests/
- https://www.scmp.com/tech/start-ups/article/3048746/artificial-intelligence-applications-surge-china-battles-contain
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