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Voice-Activated Commerce Interfaces

By Soja s on 20th January 2024

Problem Statement

Current e-commerce platforms often lack intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, especially for users with accessibility needs. Traditional interfaces rely heavily on visual elements, making it challenging for individuals with visual impairments or those engaged in multitasking to navigate and make purchases easily. There is a need for a more inclusive and convenient way to interact with e-commerce platforms.

Abstract

Create voice-activated interfaces for e-commerce platforms to address accessibility challenges and enhance user experience. Leveraging natural language processing and voice recognition technologies, the project aims to enable users to navigate product listings, make purchases, and interact with the e-commerce platform using spoken commands. The goal is to provide a seamless and hands-free shopping experience, accommodating users with different needs and preferences.

Outcome

The project’s outcome is an e-commerce platform equipped with voice-activated interfaces that allow users to perform various tasks using natural language commands. Users, including those with visual impairments or those engaged in multitasking, can efficiently navigate through product options, receive information, and complete purchases solely through voice interactions. The enhanced accessibility and convenience offered by voice-activated interfaces are expected to broaden the user base, improve overall user satisfaction, and create a more inclusive and user-friendly e-commerce experience.

Reference

Automatic voice-controlled systems have changed the way humans interact with a computer. Voice or speech recognition systems allow a user to make a hands-free request to the computer, which in turn processes the request and serves the user with appropriate responses. After years of research and developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, today voice-controlled technologies have become more efficient and are widely applied in many domains to enable and improve human-to-human and human-to-computer interactions. The state-of-the-art e-commerce applications with the help of web technologies offer interactive and user-friendly interfaces. However, there are some instances where people, especially with visual disabilities, are not able to fully experience the serviceability of such applications. A voice-controlled system embedded in a web application can enhance user experience and can provide voice as a means to control the functionality of e-commerce websites. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of speech recognition systems (SRS) and present a voice-controlled commodity purchase e-commerce application using IBM Watson speech-to-text to demonstrate its usability.

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