Ai Video: Gearing up for voice-based transactions

20th May, 2019

Voice commerce is transforming the way travellers search, browse and buy online.

Travel brands have been focusing on the utility of voice features/ assistants, keenly evaluating those aspects of a trip that are tedious, and how can voice make the experience better.

“We have witnessed great advancement in the manner in which one can communicate with voice assistants, their context being understood and being helped out (in various tasks),” said Rodrigo Sánchez Prandi, VP Product, dLocal, who added that the e-commerce sector is witnessing progress on the payments side, too. So from checking the status of a flight to amenities in a particular flight such as Wi-Fi to checking in etc., one can buy trip essentials as well.

Companies like Google acknowledge that designing conversations is quite tricky as human conversations are complicated.

Prandi fittingly referred to the significance of understanding the specific use case of voice search, and counting on contextualization to deliver the best possible experience. “If a traveller is looking for Madrid to London flight, it is important to come up with only a couple of options, rather than giving a user 20 options. There is a need to know the customer really well,” he said. Progress is rapid owing to the fact that these offerings are always getting smarter, delivering new capabilities. The more one uses Alexa or Google Assistant, the more they adapt to a speech type/ pattern, lexicon/ jargon, likings etc.

Some of the considerations that travel e-commerce need to dwell upon:

• Creating a specific voice app like capitalizing on Alexa skills

• Difference between direct voice buys and open-ended voice searches

• Streamlining UX (for instance, Amazon Alexa recommends that enable users to initiate checkout on the website or mobile app, and complete the purchase via Alexa, or vice versa)