Well then, first place at the internal hackathon “Voice for Commerce” – DONE. The full cycle of product selection-cart-checkout – without touching the keyboard or mouse.
At the same time, I’m somewhat skeptical about voice interfaces in e-commerce. To be precise, I believe that certain segments like purchasing music and movies, confirming regular payments, and subscriptions will work wonderfully. Why? I think the future belongs to interfaces with a higher density than visual ones, and audio has significantly less information density. Context is crucial here, which is quite difficult to translate into a computational brain lacking the same social experience as my surroundings and myself. I believe that the voice channel should and will complement the others, but only be noticeable in certain areas, albeit gradually expanding. We won’t be buying sofas over the phone until “Just Sofa” becomes a trend.
And today, I genuinely regretted for the first time that YouTube still can’t handle all this. I bought food at the supermarket enough for 15 bags, and before the mad rush home, I turned on the second episode about Gagarin to occupy my ears, while my phone ended up at the bottom of one of the bags. And almost immediately, YouTube plays two ads in a row: one from Amplitude lasting over 20 minutes and another short one right after. And for all those twenty-plus minutes, I had to listen to Amplitude until I got home with the bags. And damn it, you’ll be waiting forever for Google to make “Skip ad” a voice command…
I’ll show the video if EPAM approves the publication of the clip. Overall, I don’t even know why I had to ask about such things, but I decided to ask anyway. After all, they did give us first place 🙂
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 