Walmart selects Mycelial to deliver voice-powered, in-home grocery shopping

What’s more convenient than heading to Walmart for everything your family needs? Having Walmart come to you!

As consumers continue to enjoy the convenience of shopping at home, Walmart CEO Doug MacMillan has made it a key strategic priority to meet customer demand with services like grocery delivery.

Walmart partnered with Mycelial to build an in-home device that leveraged the same AI/ML infrastructure used by Walmart’s text-to-shop products. However, user expectations for latency are much stricter for a voice-powered interaction than a text message interaction. Imagine talking to your friend on the phone and waiting 10 seconds before answering!

“For an increasing number of customers, Walmart will be seen more like a service. Customers will think of us as the merchant that serves their wants and needs, but in ways that take less time and effort.”

Using Mycelial, the Walmart team was able to move all the user-facing AI/ML from the Cloud to the in-home device. Behind the scenes, Mycelial synchronized the customer’s shopping history data to the device, so that when the customer asked for “milk,” the correct item was added to the customer’s cart, without waiting for a response from the Cloud.

Because Mycelial synchronized the customer’s shopping data from the in-home device to Walmart’s Cloud, customers could speak naturally and in real-time, a key differentiator with other voice-assistants with long delays and pauses. Mycelial provided Walmart with a production-ready, scalable means to move data to and from consumer Edge devices without the overhead of any additional software to install, host, or maintain.