Walmart adds voice-shopping feature on Assistant

San Francisco, April 3 (IANS) Competing with the likes of Alexa-powered Amazon, retail giant Walmart is now adding a voice-controlled shopping feature called "Walmart Voice Order" on Google Assistant.

To use the feature, users are required to add and link their existing Walmart accounts to Google Assistant which will enable them to shop using voice commands, just like Amazon offers with Alexa, The Verge reported on Tuesday. 

While users would use Google's voice service to add things to their carts and place orders, Walmart would actually handle processing and delivering the order.

According to Walmart's announcement of the new Assistant integration, the roll-out of the service would take a few weeks. 

The integration seems interesting because, earlier in January, Walmart opted out of Google's Express shopping service, presumably to focus more on its own retail efforts instead of funnelling them through the search-engine giant. 

In July 2018, Walmart teamed up with software major Microsoft in a five-year strategic partnership to make use of its cloud services to compete with Amazon in the digital space.