What Happened
Starbucks has updated its mobile app to bring new voice-ordering features to its iOS app. Dubbed “My Starbucks Barista,” the new feature that will let customers order drinks with voice commands by speaking to a virtual AI barista. If they prefer, customers can also opt to put in their orders via texts. Moreover, Starbucks also launched this voice-ordering function as an Alexa Skill so that Amazon Echo owners can conveniently reorder their pre-set Frappuccinos simply by saying “Alexa, order my Starbucks.”
What Brands Need To Do
As an early-adopter of mobile ordering and payment technology, Starbucks have been quite advanced in embracing new mobile channels. In fact, the massive popularity of its mobile ordering feature has reportedly resulted in its baristas are having trouble keeping up with the huge amount of mobile orders during rush hours. And with the recent rise of voice-activated devices led by Amazon’s smart speaker Echo, it makes sense for Starbucks to embrace conversational interfaces so as to enhance its customer experience.
As tech giants such as Google and Amazon continue to make strong pushes for their conversational products, more and more mainstream consumers will soon become reachable via those emerging voice-based devices. Therefore, brands will need to explore opportunities in building advanced applications for these emerging platforms with highly engaging user experiences and conversational interactions.
How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building branded chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The NiroBot we built in collaboration with Ansible for Kia is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a chatbot experience supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data. If you’re interested in learning more about this or have a client opportunity, please reach out to our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.
Source: Engadget
