Amazon has taken online customer shopping experience a notch higher with a voice-enabled feature powered by Alexa, its virtual voice assistant.

The voice-enabled shopping in English went live on Amazon’s Android app three days ago, a top executive told BusinessLine .

Amazon customers can now use voice commands to search for products across categories, add to cart, check order status or proceed to checkout. All customers have to do to start shopping with voice commands is to tap on the mike icon on the top right hand corner of the Amazon shopping app and say, for instance, “show me sarees,” “add noodles to my cart,” “what is the status of my delivery?” or “go to my account.”

Along with shopping, customers can also ask for the latest cricket score, the weather in Bengaluru or for Rajnikanth’s birthdate or simply say “tell me a joke” and Alexa will provide answers to all your questions and even tell you a joke.

“Voice is the most natural way to interact and engage with customers. In a touch-only world, customers are often forced to learn the apps’ interaction patterns. We are trying to remove all barriers for the next 100 million customers by simplifying the shopping experience with voice on our app,” said Kishore Thota, Director, Customer Experience & Marketing, Amazon India.

Additionally, as a Prime only benefit, Amazon Prime members can listen to their favourite music, ad free, directly on the Amazon shopping app via Prime Music. They can do this while shopping using natural language voice commands like - “play top songs by AR Rahman” or “play the latest English songs”s and so on.

“The important thing that we have learned with voice interface is that our customers will continue to guide the overall experience and depending on how customers are using their voice to shop, Alexa will use dynamic learning to get better.

Alexa's deep neural networks and machine learning algorithms will improve the overall shopping experience. Voice based experiences, if done right, have the potential to flip the paradigm and change the way customers engage using touch, type and voice functionalities with their smart devices,” said Thota.