If you’re a regular shopper at Walmart and you want your weekly grocery tasks to be more convenient, they’ve thought of the perfect solution for you. You will now be able to use voice commands on your Google Assistant to do your shopping for you. Well, sort of. This means that any device that supports Google’s digital assistant like smartphones and smart speakers will be able to add to your shopping list (and do it smartly) and eventually make the purchase for you.
All you have to do to trigger what they’re calling the “Walmart Voice Order” is to say, “Hey Google, talk to Walmart”. This of course assumes that you’re logged in to your Walmart account. Then you can add things throughout the day to your cart by saying things like, “Add milk to my cart”. Don’t worry, it won’t immediately purchase them but they’ll be added to the cart when you’re ready.
If you’ve made prior purchases of that item, it will quickly identify the brand and the number of items and then ask you to confirm if that’s indeed what you want to buy. So instead of going very specific when adding things to your cart, you can just say “add milk” and the system should be able to figure out what it is you want to get, provided you use the service often.
This will be available with any device that supports Google Assistant so that includes Android phones, smart speakers, smart displays like Google Home Hub, smartwatches, and other devices. It is also cross-platform so you can use any device, move on to another, and pick up where you left off. Walmart also plans to add the other digital assistants soon so expect some announcements eventually.
It’s things like this that make AI truly useful rather than just a trick pony that can amaze us. Those who don’t have time to drop by the grocery or even to sit down and add things to their cart on the online store will now be able to just use voice commands and let Google Assistant do your shopping for you, which can be both convenient and slightly scary of course.
SOURCE: Walmart
