Selling Wine by Voice Assistants
Google and Amazon are investing really so much in the voice assistant technology. Why? To sell everything to everybody, of course. Now they are going to learn how to sell wine.
Alexa’s Wine Finder is still learning
Alexa is the Amazon’s assistant, and you can interact with her using a device named Amazon Echo; you can ask her to buy everything is in the Amazon store and more other.
When you talk to Alexa, asking to buy you a bottle of wine, she activates a specialized bot, Wine Finder, finding for you the right wine.
The sentence to activate the bot is something like this: ‘Alexa, ask Wine Finder what wine to pair with a steak‘.
Amazon says that there’re 500 food&wine pairings, although it goes on to propose Merlot, Chardonnay, Cab or Viognier. It hasn’t too much experience in the art of sommelierìe, you can read the four (yes, only four) comments in the dedicated page of Amazon, with 3.5 stars.
Google Home in the Wine corner
Google also is launching its voice assistant in the food&wine sector, but it has another strategy.
At May 2018 it has signed an agreement with retail office of Auchan, the French supermarkets, to help them to sell wine using Google Home and a bot in the Google Shopping platform. The schema is the same as the Amazon one, you ask what wine is the best pairing with a food, and the bot tell you the right answer. There’re more than 1200 different labels of French wines, but also US, Chile and Australia.
Claire Koralewski, chief of Customer and Innovation at Auchan, the vocal assistants are the future in the sales, giving to the customers a new user experience and useful tips as an human can do, but pairing the right wine is an hard job, like the Napa Valley data analytics expert Jon Moramarco says.
Out of doubts, the voice assistants to sell wine are a great opportunity to approach the customers needs; this is possible not only for great stores, but for little ones also. A bot is a simple software, you can activate it from your social account or your web site. You can ask your customers what do they think about your wines, if you are a producer, or about your service, if you are a little wine shop.
The AI for wine doesn’t work good, yet. May be it needs humans sommelier to learn how pair food and wine.
