Loud and clear: How voice commerce is changing the game in digital shopping

Voice commerce is a type of commerce enabled by voice assistant technologies that let customers discover, select and purchase products using natural speech. Instead of tapping and typing, consumers speak to devices like Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant to complete their entire shopping journey — from search to checkout.

It’s essential to distinguish between voice commerce and conversational commerce. The latter covers all conversational experiences — voice and text — including chatbots, messaging apps and conversational UIs. Voice commerce is a specialized subset focused specifically on spoken interaction with voice assistants as the interface.

Voice commerce has quickly moved from a novelty to a mainstream channel. 

According to Capital One Shopping, consumer adoption continues to rise: 

• In 2024–25, there were an estimated 8.4 billion active voice assistant devices globally — more devices than people in some markets. 

• Nearly half of US consumers use voice search for shopping.

• 62% of smart speaker users plan to make a purchase with voice in the near future, while 74% of voice‑AI users have completed a buying task with a voice assistant. 

• Local and small business discovery via voice is also booming: More than half of consumers use voice search to find nearby businesses.

In addition, the global voice shopping market is projected to total about $62 billion in 2025 — nearly quadruple what it was just a few years ago. Long‑term forecasts see the voice commerce ecosystem reaching over $250 billion by 2033, supported by wide adoption of AI‑powered assistants.  

It’s important to note that voice assistants are increasingly embedded in cars, phones, smart homes and wearables — expanding the contexts in which voice commerce can occur. For instance, automotive voice assistants alone have 240 million active users globally and are standard in many new vehicles sold in 2025. 

These numbers confirm what many brands already feel: Voice commerce is a rapidly growing, revenue‑driving channel that will continue to rise, especially in the era of agentic AI.

Consumer readiness is clear — but what comes next is action from businesses. Across industries, organizations are:

Expanding voice‑enabled search

Brands are optimizing websites and product catalogs for natural language queries so assistants can serve better results without a screen.

Developing voice apps and integrations

Companies are building voice experiences — such as Alexa skills or Google Assistant actions — that let users shop directly by speaking.

Optimizing content for conversational queries

Voice search favors long‑tail phrasing like conversational questions. Content that answers common spoken intents out loud (e.g., “What are the best running shoes under €100?”) performs better in voice responses.

Bridging in‑store & online experience

Retailers are piloting voice assistants in physical locations — for product info, availability checks and contactless checkout — creating a seamless omnichannel experience.

Secure and intelligent transactions

Voice commerce has evolved beyond simple ordering. Today, it supports secure payments via voice biometrics, conversational checkout flows, AI-powered product comparisons and recommendations and even voice-guided reordering and subscription management — making shopping faster, smarter and more personalized than ever.

Voice commerce is supercharged by Artificial Intelligence (AI) — especially agentic AI, which goes beyond simple triggers to make decisions, take actions and complete tasks autonomously. This is how:

Natural language processing (NLP) and context understanding

Voice assistants rely on advanced natural language processing (NLP) and AI models to interpret user intent, handle complex queries, and respond appropriately — from product recommendations to order placements. These systems continually improve their understanding of human speech nuances.

The rise of agentic AI

Where traditional voice assistants simply execute commands, agentic AI:

• Proactively suggests items based on past buying behavior.

• Compares products with rationale.

• Handles price checks, scheduling and repeat orders autonomously.

• Can even complete purchases end‑to‑end with minimal user intervention.

Financial analysts project that by 2030, nearly half of US online shoppers will use AI shopping agents — boosting eCommerce spend by tens of billions. 

Major retail players are already advancing in this space:

• Amazon’s Rufus, Walmart’s Sparky and other assistants can now recommend and act on voice queries.

• ChatGPT and other language models are being integrated with commerce datasets to deliver contextual, personalized voice shopping experiences.

The best part for businesses? Modern commerce platforms make adopting voice commerce far less daunting.

Voice or conversational AI sits on top of your data. For it to work effectively, your commerce data needs to be:

• Centralized.

• Accessible via APIs.

• Structured for natural language understanding. 

This is why composable commerce is ideal. It gives AI full access to product catalogs, inventory, customer profiles and personalization signals, without rigid monolithic architecture holding you back.