Speech Recognition in Grocery Shopping

The next step in online shopping is speech recognition technology, giving consumers a relatively new way of completing their grocery shopping quickly and easily. Speech recognition in grocery shopping is still in its infancy, but early adopters are making full use of it. People already routinely ask their voice activated devices the weather or what their schedule is for the rest of the day when they first wake up. You can expect people to use these same devices to do their grocery shopping for them in the years to come. This is because speech recognition technology makes peoples’ jobs much smoother and easier than getting on internet browsers and typing or using apps for the purpose of making orders.

Digitizing ‘the moment of inspiration’

‘The moment of inspiration’ refers to the moment that you suddenly realize you are in need of a particular grocery item, such as toilet paper, cereal or milk. It is the moment you realize you have to purchase such an item the next time you go to the grocery store. However, the moment on inspiration is often easily forgotten, as we fail to write it down or feed it into our smartphones. This can lead to frustration when we forget to pick up the required item. Speech recognition technology will make it easier to remember this ‘moment of inspiration.’

Up until very recently, locking down on the moment of inspiration was impossible for retailers. But since 2014, this has all changed. Amazon released Amazon Dash Wand that year, a fridge magnet that came with speech recognition technology and a bar code scanner, enabling users to scan products and dictate items onto their shopping lists, making grocery shopping a more convenient, easier experience. It benefited Amazon, too, who were able to record their consumers’ shopping patterns for their own market research.

Amazon Echo, a hand’s free speaker, voice-controlled, is another Amazon product and service that relies on voice recognition technology, enabling users to record their moment of inspiration by simply speaking a sentence, a sentence like, “Alexa, add milk to my shopping list.”

Hiku by Waitrose

More and more gadgets that make grocery shopping more efficient are being launched. One such gizmo is Hiku by Waitrose, generating shopping lists, ensuring nothing is forgotten, scanning barcodes, recognizes voices, and sending items to their accounts.

Speech recognition and grocery retailers

Speech recognition is not only making the lives of shoppers easier, but it is making the lives of retailers easier as well. Retailers are expected to soon have the ability to create voice-based ‘bots,’ that will be connected to devices and offer services and answers to their customers’ questions. The bots could be asked a question like, “What is on sale today?” and they would be able to answer, “The brand X is on sale. Would you like to add it to your shopping list?” It will revolutionize the way grocery shopping is carried out, the possibilities being endless, with retailers who get left behind feeling outdated.

Check out some other industries integrating speech recognition.

Speech Recognition in Cars                                Speech Recognition in the Travel Industry

Speech Recognition in Customer Service        The Future of Speech Recognition Technology