Google and Walmart are partnering on voice shopping in a challenge to Amazon’s Alexa

via recode.net - Alexa, how do you spell “competition”?

Google and Walmart have entered into a partnership to make hundreds of thousands of Walmart products available to purchase through the Google Home voice-controlled speaker, the tech giant’s answer to the Amazon Echo, the companies told Recode on Tuesday.

Owners of the Google Home gadget will be able to order one item at a time from Walmart completely by voice, or add multiples items to an online shopping cart for larger orders, and complete the purchase via the Google Home app later on.

Google first introduced voice shopping to Google Home earlier this year with partner retailers like Costco, Walgreens and PetSmart in a bid to offer commerce functionality like Amazon’s Alexa voice service already did.

In late September, Walmart will join those retailers in the program as well as on the Google Express shopping marketplace, which started out as a same-day delivery service in a handful of markets but has since expanded to include more traditional shipping speeds from partner retailers so that the service could cover the entire contiguous U.S.

On both sides, the partnership seems like a smart hedge in the event that shopping by voice actually takes off. For Google, Amazon has already emerged as an unlikely foe as more and more online shoppers start their product searches on Amazon instead of on the traditional search engine, where Google is used to placing lucrative ads alongside those type of search results. A study last year found that 55 percent of U.S. adults start their online shopping trips on Amazon.

And if voice commerce becomes popular and shoppers actually start searching for products by speaking to a device, Walmart is perhaps the only retailer in the U.S. that comes close to offering the breadth of Amazon’s product catalogue. (ontinueReading

Related:  Amazon Cutting Whole Foods’ Prices Cost Other Grocers $11 Billion In Value