How Home Assistant Technology is Changing E-commerce and the Way We Call

New products and tech are emerging every day, geared to control seemingly every aspect of our home. Much of this is linked to voice-activated home assistant technology and it's even changing the way we call.

From our lighting and heating to home security and entertainment, we can now control so many areas of living just by talking to a device.Moreover, leading tech companies have invested in AI-powered and voice interactive home assistant technology in a bid to enhance convenience in our digital lives.

In light of this, business owners and marketers must explore how to adopt home assistant technologies for commercial ends, especially when it comes to communicating with customers.

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Adopting Home Assistant Technology for E-commerce

Consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with chatbots and virtual assistants. In the light of this, widespread adoption of voice-activated technology seems inevitable. This is supported by the fact that the Amazon Echo Dot home assistant device was the best-selling product on Amazon Prime Day Sales.

A recent study of more than 1,600 US consumers by Walker Sands found that around 19 percent of consumers had made a voice purchase through a digital home assistant such as Amazon Echo. Another 33 percent of consumers plan to do so in the following year. As the accuracy of voice recognition continues to improve and the product range offered by voice commerce expands, its popularity will continue to rise. As consumers see the benefits of efficiency and convenience, that growth will be compounded.

So what does this mean for businesses? How will voice commerce intersect with e-commerce?

There is a great opportunity to grab for online retailers to grab a head start. Gain an understanding of home assistant technology now and learn how customers are using it to buy products and communicate with companies.

Currently, smart-home devices with voice-controlled personal assistants, such as Siri-powered Apple's HomePod, Alexa-powered Amazon's Echo, Ali Baba's Tmall Genie, and Google Home, are gearing up to launch the next disruption in e-commerce. A good example is to ask Alexa to place an order to be shipped from Amazon.

It's also possible to future-proof an online business and make home assistants our a productive new sales channel before the competition has adjusted to these new devices. For example, businesses could optimize the content on e-commerce websites by adding more natural language that crops up in everyday speech. This is where voice search and purchase comes into the equation.

Adjusting to Voice Search

Voice searches tend to use more long-tail keywords, as well as simpler words that are more common in regular conversation. Similarly, they often include questions with a preference for highly localized search results.

With that in mind and a wide range of search areas to impact, from business listings to product descriptions, it is important for companies to shift focus from solely text-based search engines to the kind of natural language that voice search and voice commerce is likely to usher in.

Another preparation to consider is more Q&A pages that use this natural language. Consider keywords and phrases that people normally use during their conversations.

As it stands right now, voice commerce with the aid of home assistant devices is just a preview of what we can accomplish as online retailers as Artificial Intelligence (AI) evolves. Nonetheless, this is an important new technology trend that e-commerce retailers especially cannot afford to ignore.

Let's take a closer look at some of the other ways that home assistant technology is likely to change consumer behavior and impact the way we communicate with customers. 

Ability to Make Conversational Queries

With devices in our home, such as Google Home, that can pick, and answer to, our commands, without the need for manual buttons and user interfaces, more people will be able to make conversational queries. What does this mean?

As consumers, we won't have to type in individual keywords as often when making a query. Instead, we will be issuing commands and asking questions. This will enhance the significance of long-tail keywords. Moreover, Google Home could engage us in conversation, asking for clarification or further commands.

This could tremendously change how we search on a regular basis, with implications for customer service, product descriptions, automated responses to common questions, and much more.

Development of AI Assistants for Shopping

The AI assistants that are accessible to the public are under continuous development, with new and more powerful features being added regularly. By working to improve the way to understand and interpret what we say, as well as encouraging third parties to develop new services for the devices, tech giants such as Amazon and Google, hope to increase the number of things their digital home assistants can do in our homes.

By the end of 2017, we could, for instance, be able to read a shopping list and have everything delivered to our doorstep without picking up a smartphone or a computer.

AI Can Analyze Habits and Inflections

Some companies are already working with technologies that can train customer predictive models. This type of AI will be able to identify the tone of a voice call to a business. With this technology, we can potentially extract a great deal of customer call data by using these predictive algorithms.

When the context of a conversation can be analyzed for language patterns in real time, it becomes possible to identify the intention and behavior of a customer. This has some significant implications for influencing the outcome of the call, which to date has been limited to post-call techniques to improve caller experience.

This new technology can process a huge amount of data in almost no time, making real-time analysis and adjustment a very real possibility. This would allow customer service reps to have the right resources on hand to better serve their callers, as well as giving marketers more ways to analyze phone conversations and optimize digital marketing campaigns accordingly.

According to experts in the industry, the technology is also geared towards matching online shopping activities with follow-up phone calls. A good example, in this case, is booking a trip and then calling to confirm the last section of the reservation with an agent to ensure we get the desired room. Connecting online transactions with phone calls can help us get a better understanding of our customers and what affects the conversions.

Home assistant technology has revolutionized how we do things in our homes. These devices are slowly making our digital lives more convenient. Business owners can also adapt these technologies for their business to significantly enhance customer interactions and brand reputation.