A Voice Controlled E-Commerce Web Application

Abstract

Automatic voice-controlled systems have changed the way humans interact with a computer. Voice or speech recognition systems allow a user to make a hands-free request to the computer, which in turn processes the request and serves the user with appropriate responses. After years of research and developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, today voice-controlled technologies have become more efficient and are widely applied in many domains to enable and improve human-to-human and human-to-computer interactions. The state-of-the-art e-commerce applications with the help of web technologies offer interactive and user-friendly interfaces. However, there are some instances where people, especially with visual disabilities, are not able to fully experience the serviceability of such applications. A voice-controlled system embedded in a web application can enhance user experience and can provide voice as a means to control the functionality of e-commerce websites. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of speech recognition systems (SRS) and present a voice-controlled commodity purchase e-commerce application using IBM Watson speech-to-text to demonstrate its usability. The prototype can be extended to other application scenarios such as government service kiosks and enable analytics of the converted text data for scenarios such as medical diagnosis at the clinics.