Shopping by voice, end to end
Amazon has added more than 100 new capabilities to Alexa for Shopping, its AI shopping assistant, letting customers handle far more of the buying journey by voice alone. The update covers everything from building a holiday gift list to sorting out a billing question.
Among the new actions, shoppers can create, add to, and edit grocery lists and baby registries. They can also manage subscriptions with spoken commands such as “Skip my next delivery,” “Pause my subscription,” or “Change my delivery to every three months.” Delivery instructions can be updated verbally, and billing questions can be asked directly — for example, “Where is my refund?”
Amazon’s vice president of conversational shopping, Rajiv Mehta, said the goal is to make every part of shopping as convenient as possible, and that the company will keep adding ways to save customers time and make shopping more personal.
Alexa for Shopping launched in May, combining the company’s Rufus shopping assistant — which Amazon says 300 million customers used last year — with the Alexa+ voice assistant, available on hundreds of millions of devices. The timing matters: recent PYMNTS Intelligence research found that 61 million US consumers now start their retail research with an AI assistant, and that AI-assisted shoppers are spending real money, not just experimenting.
Voice-led shopping is becoming a practical everyday channel rather than a novelty, especially for repeat purchases, subscriptions, and post-purchase questions. Explore other AI assistants in our directory, including ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Source: PYMNTS
