Companies explore shopping by voice

Associated Press

NEW YORK

When the world shifted from personal computers to smartphones, websites had to slim down to work on smaller screens and slower wireless connections. A similar shift to voice-centric services is again forcing businesses to rethink how they present information to consumers – and spurring new efforts to help them do so.

The software company Adobe, for instance, announced Tuesday a new suite of tools that could help airlines, retailers and other companies create simple voice interfaces for travel and shopping. It’s not a simple task, since a voice-based digital assistant can’t really list dozens of flight options or hundreds of products.

That means companies have to figure out how to winnow down those choices to the travel options or products people are most likely to want – an inherently fraught undertaking.

The technology is still in its infancy, and Adobe doesn’t have any actual corporate partners to showcase yet. But its announcement, made in conjunction with a tech show in Barcelona, Spain, shows that voice assistants are becoming important channels for reaching consumers.

Amazon’s voice-shopping feature already boils down shopping requests to one or two options and makes buying easy because it already has payment and shipping information for voice-eligible customers. But smaller businesses don’t have the computing resources and expertise to match that, which is where companies such as Adobe come in.