On-line grocery store Ocado has now made it even less necessary for you to ever leave your house. If you’re not content with being able to just ring Tesco and order them to deliver your shopping, you can now do it over a “Search By Voice” application on the Android – completely cutting anything human out of the equation!
What’s the service?
Ocado has been running since 2002, and is one of the biggest on-line grocery services in the UK. It’s got a genuinely impressive list of stores on it’s “will deliver from” list, and claims to have over 21,000 product lines available.
The mobile application is effectively the same as the on-line one. You go to Ocado and tell it where you live. If it delivers to your address, you can then search through its database of products, assemble a shopping list and hit “deliver”. You can even set up an “Instant Shop” option that will create a “typical” order for you at the press of a button.
The iPhone app has been available for a while now – but todays launch of the Android app sees several “Android Only” features that iPhone users don’t have access to. Of these, the most interesting is Voice Search – you can just speak the product name you want to search it, using Google Speech Recognition.
Jason Gissing, co-founder of Ocado, explains: “Our continual motivation is to make food shopping as quick and painless as possible for customers; we’re thrilled to now be doing this via an innovative Android app. Last summer we were the first UK supermarket on the iPhone, and going live on Android is the next step of a revolutionary journey to be available across several digital platforms. Top-draw service and great value has never been so accessible – Android means many more shoppers being just a pocket away from great Tesco Price Matches, from handy hourly booking slots and from super-reliable kitchen table delivery. We’re really excited as to where we can go next.”
What we think?
The sarcasm of my first paragraph aside, I actually do think this is a valuable service – especially those who are pressed for time. Stuck in a traffic jam on the commute home? Don’t worry about heading to the shop, you can just set up a shopping list by muttering random grocery items into your phone in between starts and stops.
“Jam… noodles… whiskey…”
All the prerequisites for a great night in.
