Alibaba faces challenges with voice shopping

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Alibaba will test a new Echo-like smart home speaker, dubbed the Tmall Genie X1, with 1,000 customers in a one-month trial, marking the e-commerce giant’s first foray into voice shopping via smart home devices, Bloomberg reports.

Like the Echo and rival JD.com’s similar DingDong speaker, Alibaba’s Tmall Genie allows customers to order products from its online marketplace by voice, among other capabilities like playing music and delivering weather and news updates.

Alibaba faces significant challenges in turning its new smart home speaker into a portal for e-commerce sales:

Smart home speakers provide a poor shopping experience, and both JD.com and Amazon have struggled to sell goods through their respective DingDong and Echo devices. The voice interface doesn’t allow customers to see the products they’re shopping for, and makes navigation extremely cumbersome, as the speaker has to list products by voice. This problem has prompted Amazon to release the camera-equipped Echo Look and touchscreen-enabled Echo Show.

Additionally, Alibaba will have to overcome voice recognition issues unique to the Chinese market. JD.com’s DingDong comes in separate Mandarin and Cantonese versions because it was too complex to put both languages into one device’s AI. The vast number of local dialects and accents in China also present a challenge for voice recognition software. This could hinder progress as Alibaba adds more voice commands — including shopping capabilities — to the device.

Turning a smart home speaker into a popular online shopping device will likely be a struggle for Alibaba, just as it has been for Amazon and JD.com. Without visual navigation, these devices are only good for limited shopping uses, like reordering items. To turn the Genie into a full-fledged shopping tool, Alibaba will need to either reinvent the digital shopping experience for voice, or add a screen for visual navigation.

Dan Van Dyke, senior research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on voice payments that:

Shares current and projected adoption of voice payments.
Outlines voice payments and banking integrations on the market.
Examines growth drivers and barriers to consumers' voice payments adoption.
Provides strategies for successfully deploying voice interfaces.

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