I need a good search solution at the supermarket!!!
Today I was looking for a specific brand of a spice in the supermarket. The whole process included locating the condiment isle and once the right isle was located, I had to sequentially browse through umpteen brands of umpteen spices before I could locate the one I was looking for. And this is when I knew what I wanted. I wasn’t researching a recipe or something!! I wanted brand “Foo” of condiment “Bar”. Its as simple as that. This never happens when I know what I am looking for at the Yahoos and Googles of the world!!!
The retail supermarkets need to innovate a bit and make it a little easier to find things. By innovation I don’t mean a gigantic search box!! It can be as simple as wrapping up the technologies that power GOOG-411 or FREE-411.
Here is how it works:
You go to a store and if you don’t know where you can find what you are looking for, you go talk to a humanoid machine who knows where it is. No need to find the sales person or stand in the customer care line!! You don’t have to be a computer whiz to use it. Its just like talking to the grocery store clerk.
The problem I have described in this post belongs to ‘limited domain search’, which is a lot easier and tractable by the current state of the art speech recognition capabilities. In other words, what I have described above is definitely doable and NOT science fiction.
Does it really make economic sense for the retail supermarkets to invest in such technologies? What else could make your shopping experience easier? Please share in the comments.
September 7th, 2007 at 6:11 am
I think this is a neat use of technology. The first step to this problem will be use a computer kiosk like what is used at Borders. You type in a book name and it tells you where it could be. If you apply the same solution and customize it to super market, it may work.
But i believe that supermarkets have a tendency to move around inventories from one isle to another isle. So that means you have to frequently keep the supermarket search database updated with what items on what isle and if you carry a particular item or brand or not.
but nevertheless, this is definitely doable in small steps.