Over the past six months, we’ve seen a major shift in the way people find and procure goods and services. Without a doubt, it involves bots, messaging platforms and intelligent assistants.

Today, bots are all the rage and, therefore, subject to considerable hype. Dev Nation has taken notice. Thousands of individual developers and their enterprise-employed counterparts see “conversational commerce” as inevitable. People turn to bots and intelligent assistants – call them Alexa, Siri, Facebook M, MyWave’s Frank and soon Viv – to recommend goods and services and, ultimately, carry out purchases on their behalf.

The aforementioned Alexa, Viv and MyWave share a vision of the future of digial commerce that involves a virtual marketplace where IAs interpret natural language input, understand an individual’s intent, and identify prospective suppliers and then enable a purchase. That’s profound.

Note well that these marketplaces are, by no means, all inclusive. IAs play the dual role of presenting an individual’s specifications and preferences to brands and suppliers that have entered into agreements with and conform to protocols established by the intelligent assistant service.

Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant offers an example of how intelligent assistant aggregators work. 3rd party online services are “plugging” themselves into the Alexa ecosystem so that Echo users can order their products directly through Alexa. Current 3rd party products and services that Alexa can order on your behalf include Uber rides, food from Domino’s, and flowers from 1-800-Flowers. All told, Amazon has over 850 3^rd party “skills” approved for Alexa. It is both impressive and indicative of how multiple ecosystems will evolve.

Users don’t need to install or open a special app to initiate a search or place an order. They just launch quest by saying the right voice command to GoogleNow, Alexa or Viv. They will easily grow accustomed to ordering a car, pizza or a gift of flowers.

In a recent demo, Viv’s CEO and co-founder Dag Kittlaus showed how the Viv intelligent assistant is also building a marketplace. Viv has selected eCommerce partners to integrate into their ecosystem. The demoed services include Uber, Proflowers, and Hotels.com. By virtue of the deep integration, Viv understands details of how each service works. For example, Viv knows that if you request a ride for 6 people, you’ll need an UberXL. This type of inside knowledge of the partner service makes the assistant smart and reduces the burden on the user.

Soundhound’s Hound voice assistant also leverages specific services to make product recommendations. There are many other conversational bots and assistants that aggregate their own set of services into a seamless conversational marketplace.

To national brands, retailers and service providers IA poses multiple challenges. They need to find the easiest way to stay in the conversation with their best customers and prospects. Ideally, they need to do so by choosing the IA with the largest circulation and growth potential. That means, at a minimum, linking into the assistant via an application program interface.

Dan Miller, lead analyst and founder at Opus Research, contributed to this article.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles, Mobile + Location

Tags: Amazon, intelligent Assistants, Viv, Alexa, SoundHound