Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, not the voice shopping aides they said they'd be

Google and Amazon have both been long giving the world a vision for a near future when most purchases will be aided by voice shopping using the **smart speakers** , but that seems far from fruition. Only a very small fraction of the smart speaker owners use the devices to make purchases, and of those who try, most give it up after the first attempt. According to a report by The Information, only 2 percent of the people with devices that use Amazon’s Alexa voice-based assistant, have shopped using their voices as of 2018. Most of these owners are Amazon Echo owners. [caption id=“attachment_4913711” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Representational image.[/caption] This figure was obtained by the publication from two people who had details about Amazon’s internal figures. According to the figures, some 50 million Alexa devices have been sold so far. Further, 90 percent of the people who bought something using voice commands on Alexa, did not use the feature again. However, some people have actually used the shopping feature using commands like “What are my deals?” and “Where is my stuff?” to track their orders. One of the two people said that it is clear how “voice shopping is not yet in the stage of being a mass market product.” The smart speakers, besides listening to music, have been used for simple voice commands used for finding out the weather, set timers and or other random questions that people ask because they want to test how cool their Amazon Echo or their **Google Home** is. There have been no real numbers officially announced by Amazon regarding the number of Alexa devices sold so far. For instance, in  a letter written by Amazon chief Jeff Bezos to shareholders earlier this year, he said that the company has sold “tens of millions of Echo devices.” It is a matter of doubt for most people to believe that people will actually make a leap from buying paper towels to expensive items such as gadgets and electronics using the voice commands. We do not know what the future holds for the smart speakers as far as shopping via voice commands are concerned, but we do know that it is going to be a tough pill to swallow for the likes of Google and Amazon.