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RESEARCH
ANALYSIS
TRENDS

Possibilities and requirements for voice assistants

in e-commerce

Voice assistants have experienced a real boom in re- daily routine and make everyday tasks more efficient
cent years and are being used on more and more de- and pleasant.
vices. Companies such as Amazon, Google or Apple
use their voice assistants among others in devices Language and the acoustic branding
such as televisions, smartphones, or smart speakers
and try to establish them permanently in the consum- Prof. Dr. Christopher Zerres, lecturer in marketing at
er's homes so that they can perform a variety of tasks the University of Offenburg with a focus on online mar-
for the users. keting and controlling, uses the phases of the buying
process in e-commerce to present various options and
Most interestingly, the sale of so-called smart speakers requirements for voice assistants.
has risen sharply worldwide over the past two years.
For the first time, these devices guarantee non-visual The language and the acoustic branding must meet
and therefore purely linguistic communication between various requirements for all steps in the purchasing
the user and the language assistant. process, he states, namely:
Even if the range of tasks performed by voice assis- • Ensuring a natural voice
tants is still relatively limited, a steady growth in the • Predefined command explanations using example
development of commands for more and more tasks sentences for a better overview of the interaction
can be observed. It is therefore predicted that voice options within a shopping skill
assistants will play an increasingly important role in

November 2020: Voice Commerce: voice search & digital voice assistants as storyteller 14