Walmart partners with Google for voice-assisted shopping

[Polycount]

Amazon was arguably the first tech company to truly popularize the concept of voice-powered shopping with its Echo devices and Alexa voice assistant, but it has quite a bit of competition now - particularly from other tech giants, like Apple and Google.

Now, Amazon is going to have to compete with Walmart as well. The brick-and-mortar retail giant has partnered up with Google to bring "Walmart Voice Order" to the public.

Voice Order will let anyone who uses Google Assistant in some form -- whether it's through a smartphone, speaker, display, or another gadget -- purchase products directly from Walmart's online shopping portal by simply telling the AI what they want to order (or add to a shopping list).

Assistant will read the item's name back and inform you of its price. Apparently, Voice Order is also capable of remembering your past orders to make future shopping a bit faster. For example, if you just say "order water," it will likely assume you mean the Dasani 24-pack you purchased a few days prior.

As TechCrunch notes, there is a downside to using Voice Order: unlike Alexa and Amazon, Assistant is not directly tied to Walmart as a first-party shopping platform. This means that you first need to ask Assistant to open up Voice Order before you can use it. It's a small inconvenience, but still worth noting if you happen to be in a rush.

At any rate, Voice Order should roll out to all Assistant users by next month, so if you don't have access to it right away, wait a few days and try again.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/79478-walmart-partners-google-voice-assisted-shopping.html

 

[psycros]

Almost every major chain store and dine-in restaurant is trying to hard-sell ordering ahead these days. They don't seem to realize that throughout most of the US nobody cares. Ordering ahead works for take-out business models like pizza parlors but that's about it. For anything with higher traffic or slower service its completely impractical and everyone knows it..all you do is get to stand in a different line from the regular shoppers. Retail and food locations are starting to devote (too many) parking spaces to pick-up customers but their not hiring more employees to serve them. Even the Cult of the New will quickly tire of this wait-in-a-different-queue charade. The end goal is obvious: McDonald's is barely even concealing their desire to eliminate dining room service altogether. How does this serve the consumer in any way? I imagine it won't take long for the market to deliver a kick in the teeth to these suits who think they can keep raising prices, rolling back services and thinning their staffs. I doubt many Americans find the idea of spending money ahead of time for the privilege of waiting in line to pick up cold fast food appealing. There are possible exceptions, of course: for things like groceries it might make sense to let someone else do your shopping if the store actually devotes enough workers to the task.