Google Assistant Conversational Shopping

Webby award-winning conversational shopping, from search to checkout with just your voice

My role

As Conversation Design Lead, I drove the creation of the Conversational Shopping dialogs, including the development of triggering grammars, over 500 printed and voiced messages and templates, and setting and enforcing the quality bar for voice-first and voice-forward experiences.

Challenge

The most common place for Google Home devices was the kitchen, and a huge share of early Assistant interactions were shopping-list additions. But turning those lists into buyable carts was laborious and time-consuming. How might we make online shopping fun, easy, and doable with just your voice?

Solution

The first end-to-end voice shopping experience to include basket building and complete cart management, conversational recovery and repair, tapered dialogs, voice checkout, and full device spectrum coverage, Conversational Shopping won a Webby for the Best Voice App in 2019 and was praised by users for its naturalness and convenience.

Hands-free shopping made possible, powerful, easy, and fun

The most common place for Google Home devices was the kitchen, and a huge share of early Assistant interactions were shopping-list additions. Conversational Shopping aimed to turn shopping-list additions into purchasable product searches, helping existing users fulfill existing intents with just their voice.

The Conversational Shopping MVP was called “Find & Buy” and did that with aplomb

Users could search for a product to buy with requests like, “buy paper towels,” and Assistant would surface results as offers to purchase.

If a user had bought that product on Google Shopping before, we’d know it and be appropriate in our response.

Cart-building offered users a more familiar and convenient way to shop with their voice than single-item purchase did. Since most merchants offer free delivery on large enough orders, multi-item purchases were critical to conversion.

Tapering prompts around grounded concepts reduced fatigue in longer dialogs, reduced abandonment rates, boosted user satisfaction ratings and add-to-cart actions, and made conversations far more natural.

We tracked progress to merchant minimums so users knew when they’d earned free delivery.

Voice checkout removed a key barrier to conversion: the handoff from voice to screen. This was hard because of complex legal and security requirements surrounding purchases.

Cart-management allowed multi-session shopping with a stateful cart, encouraging re-engagement and finally conversational shopping close to feature-parity with conventional online shopping.

Thanks to strong grounding and contextual responses, cart-management created unusually good cohesion between related features as users naturally traversed them.

Guided Product Search

An NLU-powered innovation, Guided Product Search introduced natural-language search refinement ability and reworked the results-reader flows to improve recall by bridging the gap between a given product space and a user’s terminological understanding thereof.