ETA Expert Insights: Voice Technology – The Next Frontier in Commerce

By Kevin Shamoun, CEO, Zeamster; Member of the ETA Technology Committee

Innovations in technology are creating new opportunities for merchants and the companies that serve them. The ETA Technology Committee looked at how voice commerce – the convergence of voice technology and artificial intelligence – is impacting the payments space, making it easier for merchants to run their business, and how it will reshape the industry in the future. Juniper Research predicts that 55% of U.S. households will have voice-enabled smart speakers by 2022. Given this rapid growth, many proprietors and small business owners may already be accustomed to using voice technology. In the right context, voice technology can streamline merchant operations without sacrificing security. And it can help set the stage for broader adoption of voice commerce in the future.

Artificial intelligence has made it easier for businesses to reach new clients, tailor products and services to fit customer expectations, and detect suspicious and fraudulent activity. And increasingly, it can also help streamline their operations, particularly with payment processing. While the operational tasks associated with running a business may vary slightly on a daily basis, the data generated by a business can vary greatly day-to-day.  For example, a restaurant owner must batch out their POS terminal at a specific time each day, but the sales volume and payment method can fluctuate for a variety of reasons, such as seasonal, day of week etc. Machine learning algorithms can help anticipate some of this variability by analyzing vast amounts of data to identify patterns and predict future occurrences. For instance, an analytics dashboard can help a business identify its best customers and offer loyalty rewards based on what the customers are likely to purchase. Or it can help determine customers’ creditworthiness in order to extend them credit at the point of sale. The payments industry is constantly uncovering new ways to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve and grow commerce.

Voice technology has largely been utilized by consumers to accomplish and perform daily tasks that range from turning on lights to ordering a pizza. Now, voice technology is being adapted to help merchants accomplish many business operational tasks more efficiently. ETA Member Zeamster has developed a skill for Amazon’s Alexa – the tasks Alexa can perform are called “skills” – that allows users to interact with the Zeamster payment gateway in a variety of ways. Users can check their organization’s batch totals and close batches; run transactions from tokenized cards; set up recurring transactions; get recurring volume forecasts and recent transactions; and even initiate a transaction on the POS terminal to collect card data. Activities that normally required a business owner to login to a PC or a mobile app can now be accomplished “hands free” using voice commands to their Alexa device.  Since Alexa is not (currently) PCI compliant, it cannot run transactions on its own, but it can initiate them on other devices (like gateways and POS terminals).

These types of functionality are important because they reduce friction for small tasks, whether one-off or repeated. Instead of logging into a dashboard to look up a single number, users can just ask their voice device. Instead of walking to the terminal to ring up a purchase, a cashier can tell the voice device to initiate the transaction on the terminal. Voice technology is well suited to this kind of context-dependent multitasking, especially when it comes to searching for information. Research from Gartner indicates that voice search represents the fastest-growing category of mobile search.

And the functionality of voice technology will only grow as the technology improves. Improving voice technology relies on two factors: artificial intelligence and voice recognition. In a sense, voice technology is another subset of artificial intelligence. In order to understand speech, the program must “learn” millions of words and all the combinations they come in. The more words it is fed, the better the program is at understanding speech. Over time, voice technology will improve and come closer to understanding and using natural speech.

With voice recognition, the design behind the user experience matters. With Zeamster’s Alexa integration, for instance, skills come in two flavors – “beginner” and “expert.” The “beginner” level asks the user to confirm nearly every step of the process. This can be helpful in the beginning, as users figure out what specific phrasing the device responds to best. The “expert” mode essentially turns off those acknowledgement prompts, requiring the user to get the command exactly right. For more experienced users, the right command can save a lot of time.

The other factor driving this development is voice recognition – how good is the physical device at picking up voices, recording them accurately, and translating them to text? Right now, retail environments are too loud for voice technology to work reliably, but this could change as the devices and text-to-speech software improve. Google Assistant can differentiate between as many as six different voice signatures, allowing users to log into their Google accounts with just their voice. As this type of voice differentiation technology improves, it will be possible to restrict device access to certain approved users as well as change levels of access and finely tune security controls. This development may alleviate some of the security concerns around new voice technology, while introducing a great deal of new functionality at the same time.

Voice technology helps merchants run their business and can make huge improvements when it is deployed in the right context and with careful attention paid to frictionless configuration. It can help back-end operations staff access important pieces of information without having to log into a cumbersome dashboard. It can also perform small but repeated tasks without disrupting staff workflow. In the right contexts, voice technology can reduce friction for merchants. And as the technology improves, there will be more opportunities to incorporate voice in retail and business environments. The key is getting the deployment right today, so that we can seamless scale up to more sophisticated uses in the future. Zeamster’s Alexa Skill highlights the possibilities for small and large merchants to leverage voice, speech recognition and powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered devices to improve business operations.