Speechly Brings Voice Purchases to In-Game Shopping

Conversational voice AI has come to the rescue of gamers frustrated with the need to pause their play to make in-game purchases. Speech recognition technology startup Speechly has teamed with gaming e-commerce and advertising platform Sayollo to integrate a voice interface into games so that players can request an item they spot in the game and confirm their order without calling a halt to the entertainment.

SAYOLLO SAYS HELLO

Sayollo offers mobile game developers a way to incorporate advertising and shopping into their creations through its gComm (gaming commerce) platform. The Israeli startup serves ads to players during the game and offers the items for purchase in a window that appears whenever the player pauses or hits a save point. Players don’t have to leave the game’s app to make the purchase, avoiding the potentially lengthy frustration of navigating a website before going back to the game. Speechly is augmenting gComm with a voice interface API enabling players to look for products and complete transactions conversationally. They can continue playing while they speak, even updating or altering the order by voice at any point before confirming the purchase.

SPEECHLY PLAYS

Speechly’s low-latency speech recognition API is a good fit for the kind of experience Sayollo wants to deliver. The AI’s real-time response method will start carrying out commands before the user finishes speaking, adjusting as more words clarify the request. That makes it faster than the traditional method, where voice assistants don’t start processing commands until the user finishes talking. Speechly simplified setting up voice user interfaces in October with a set of templates. Voice UIs are the tools used to understand what a user says and respond appropriately. The templates work to assure users that the AI is working by adding multimodal experiences to the audio interactions. The combination means game developers should be able to implement the voice interactions without much extra work. Those playing games produced by the more than 20 brands signed up with Sayollo should be able to complete their transactions more efficiently.