The Effect of Voice AI on Consumer Purchase and Search Behavior

Abstract

Voice-activated shopping devices (voice AI), such as Amazon’s Alexa or Alibaba’s Tmall Genie, as a new channel for shopping, are gaining popularity among consumers worldwide. It has become important, therefore, to understand how voice AI adoption affects consumer shopping behaviors. In this paper, we use large-scale archival data containing consumer-level browsing and purchase records from one of the world’s largest online retailer, Alibaba, who has developed and launched its own voice AI product called Tmall Genie to empirically identify our results. The results show that consumers on average spend 23% more and browse 11% more as a result of adopting the voice AI, corresponding to approximately US$ 613 million increase in sales revenue and 12.7 billion more pageviews every year. The effect on purchase is stronger for younger consumers and male, whereas the effect on browsing is more salient for elder consumers and female. We also find that although the positive effect on purchases and pageviews shrink over time, it still remains significant and large after eight weeks. Moreover, the voice channel does not cannibalize other purchase channels (PC and mobile); rather, it has a positive spillover effect on the mobile channel. Lastly, the impact of voice AI adoption on purchase is stronger for products that do not require active search or comparison, such as product categories with low substitutability or high purchase frequency. To summarize, we demonstrate that the adoption of voice AI has enhanced the growth of the digital sales market in the world’s largest e-commerce platform. The findings provide useful implications for both e-commerce companies and businesses that harness voice-assisted shopping.