Walmart adds AI-generated audio summaries to select product pages

This, alongside Amazon’s announcement of a similar feature in May, shows how major retailers are experimenting with audio as a new format for AI-powered shopping, seeing it as another way to help shoppers quickly make more informed purchases.

Like Amazon’s feature, Walmart’s AI shopping hosts summarize product details and reviews. To hear an example, one can navigate to this product page for Paul Mitchell shampoo on the mobile app and tap the “Hear the summary” button below the product images.

A Walmart spokesperson told Modern Retail that the company started testing audio summaries this summer and plans to expand it to other categories in the coming months. The spokesperson said Walmart honed in on beauty because this is a category where customers often seek expert or community guidance. The feature includes validation checks that ensure the summaries meet the company’s requirements, according to the spokesperson.

“AI audio helps simplify complex decisions by turning product reviews and insights into authentic, human-sounding conversations that recommend the right regimen for each skin type,” the Walmart spokesperson said.

The announcement came in a news release along with those of other new shopping features for the holidays. Those include a feature where customers can search for Black Friday deals, rollbacks and clearance items in their stores, in-store navigation in the app, holiday wish lists that sort by aisle, AI-powered party planning, and AI-generated digital showrooms based on product photos.

Martin Balaam, CEO of product data platform Pimberly, said he imagines this evolving into a feature where customers walk around a store with camera-equipped glasses — in that it succinctly turns product data into digestible audio and could be paired up with other technology, such as AI image recognition. Audio features could describe different products customers pass and tell the shoppers whether they’re new or on sale, he said.

“Being able to break away from just using visual aids [in stores] is huge,” Balaam said. “You can actually be absorbing a lot more information if you’re using as many of your senses as possible.”

Karen Kelso, a vp at research firm Kantar who covers Walmart, said this puts Walmart’s AI functionality more on par with what Amazon offers but doesn’t significantly change its relationship with customers.

She said most shoppers are unlikely to sit through a full description of a product and its reviews, and would rather ask a chatbot about their specific needs or compare products to others. However, she said this will be a relief to shoppers who are visually impaired and would otherwise have trouble reading product descriptions or reviews.

Kantar estimates that by the end of this year, Walmart will have spent $17 billion on automation, technology, supply chain and other capital expenditures, based on Walmart’s last financial release. Kelso said that while the company has invested a lot in how AI can help behind the scenes, this is an example of the company promoting a more fun, customer-facing use case to get the attention of shoppers and investors.

“Having more constancy in their communication about all the things they’re doing with AI is probably part of it,” Kelso said. “There’s a lot of press given to other companies investing large sums in AI, both from the software side as well as the partnership side with the big players. I think Walmart doesn’t want to get left out of that conversation of being as invested and implementing AI as much as they are.”