When a shopper asks Emporiqa's chat for a kind of product, it shows three to five picks spread across price points and styles, says there are more, and asks one question that narrows the choice. When the shopper wants the rest, a "Show more" button brings the next three to five and a plain "show me all of them" brings up to ten at a time, never one already shown, until every match its search found has been on screen. Voice mode works on that pattern out loud: the shopper speaks, hears a short answer, and the product cards stay on screen.
Fifty results hand the shopper a homework assignment
Type "hoodie" into most store search bars and you get a grid. Forty-eight products, sorted by relevance, which on many catalogs means whatever the platform guessed. The shopper now has to do what a salesperson would do in a shop: work out how the products differ, which differences matter to them, and which three deserve a closer look.
Many don't. They open two, compare the prices, and leave to think about it. Too many options at once make a choice harder, and the easiest way out of a hard choice is to put it off. I wrote about the search-bar side of this in why your search bar is losing sales.
A good salesperson on the shop floor handles that request differently. Ask for a hoodie and they bring three: a cheap one, a heavy one, a zip one. Then they ask what it is for. That question moves the sale further than the other forty-five hoodies would.
I built the chat to do what the salesperson does.
What the shopper sees first
How many products appear depends on what the shopper asked.
- A broad request ("do you have smartphones?", "show me hoodies"): three to five cards, picked to cover different price points, styles and brands, plus one short question. On our demo store, "do you have smartphones" gets five phones, from an iPhone 14 at €699 up to a Galaxy S24 Ultra, and the question "iPhone or Android?".
- A specific need ("a phone for my mum", "a laptop for a student who edits video"): the chat leads with the product it would choose and says why it fits that need. Then it offers to add it to the cart.
- A request for several options ("give me three ideas"): the lead pick with its reason, plus two or three alternatives from that search, each named with its price.
The sentence above the cards always says when it is a selection: "a few hoodies to start", "and there are more". A bare "5 hoodies" reads as the whole shelf, and a shopper who thinks they have seen everything stops looking.
"Show more" is one tap away
Under the cards the shopper gets up to three suggested replies to tap. When the search found more products than the chat showed, the first one is "Show more". The other two narrow the list, and they come from your catalog data: a value becomes a button only when several of the products found carry it, such as a brand, a fit or a price. "Under £25" appears under a list of polo shirts because enough of the polos found cost less than that, so each narrowing button leads to products you stock.
Tapping "Show more", or typing "show me all of them", brings the next batch:
- It never repeats a product already shown in the conversation.
- "Show more" brings the next three to five. A request for all of them brings up to ten at a time.
- After a couple of rounds it adds a narrowing question, because paging through a category ten cards at a time is slower than answering "zip or pullover?".
- When every product the search found has been shown, the "Show more" button goes away and the chat says that is everything it found.
Why it never tells the shopper how many you have
An early version of the chat said things like "we have 5 headphones in stock". The store had far more. The number was how many products survived one search, after ranking, the in-stock filter and grouping colours under one product. It looked like a fact about the shelf, it was wrong, and the shopper could check it.
Now the chat says there are more, and never how many. That rule also covers the end of the list: it says "that's everything I found", never "that's everything we carry".
The "Show more" button had its own bug. On a headphone search it kept offering more after all eleven products found had been shown, and the tap brought back ones the shopper had already seen. Whether anything is left is now counted in code, outside the language model, so the button appears only when there is something new behind it.
What this does for you as the store owner
A shortlist gives the shopper something to decide between. Three products, each with the reason it fits, and a question underneath ("iPhone or Android?") turn a browse into a choice within a couple of messages. More on how the search finds those products in AI product search, from keywords to conversations.
You also see what your shoppers narrow on. Every conversation is saved in your dashboard, and the answers they give ("road or trail?", "under £25?") tell you how your customers choose in your category.
There is nothing to configure. The picks come from the catalog your plugin already syncs, and the narrowing buttons from the brands and attributes on those products. If you would rather show answers only, switch off "Suggest follow-up replies" in your store settings. The shopper can still type "show more".
Voice: where a short list stops being optional
On a screen a long list is tiring. Read aloud it does not work at all: nobody wants to hear "blue, size M, 49 euros 90, in stock, twelve left" twenty times over.
So voice mode reads only the sentences of the answer. Product cards, comparison tables and the cart stay on screen where the shopper can see them, while the chat talks about the two or three that matter. Narrowing first is what keeps a spoken answer short enough to listen to.
For the shopper it goes like this:
- They tap the microphone button next to the message box. The first time, the chat tells them they will talk to an AI salesperson with an AI voice, and they tap "Start talking".
- They say what they want. One recording can last up to 18 seconds.
- Their words appear for a moment before they are sent, so a misheard word can be cancelled.
- The answer is read aloud in the shopper's language, the cards appear, and the microphone turns on again for the next question.
They can mute the replies, switch to typing or end voice mode at any time. If someone from your team steps into the conversation, voice mode switches off and the shopper types to that person.
The accent follows your "Language and spelling" setting. Map your English to British English and the voice speaks British English.
Transcription sometimes gets a name wrong. In one test conversation a shopper asked by voice whether they could pay with "Quarna". The chat answered that the store lists Klarna, gave the payment options, and carried on. To help with your own names, the chat passes your store name and your most common brands and categories to the transcription step as spelling hints.
What voice costs
Voice is off until you switch on "Voice mode" in your store settings. A conversation in which the shopper speaks costs $0.15 on top of the $0.25 conversation, so $0.40 in all. It is charged once per conversation, however many times the shopper speaks, and only when the conversation itself is charged. It comes out of your signup credit first and counts toward your monthly cap: at the default $59 that is about 147 voice conversations, or about 236 typed ones. Switching voice off stops the charge at once, including in chat windows already open on your store. Typed conversations cost what they always did. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.
Where it falls short
- "All" means all the search found. One search hands the chat up to 50 candidates. On a category with hundreds of products, "show me all" pages through those, ten at a time, and a narrower question ("navy hoodies under £30") reaches products a broad one would not.
- The counts are rules the chat follows, so they vary a little. You will see two cards when only two products fit, and sometimes six or seven when a shopper asks for all of them.
- Voice needs a current browser and HTTPS. It works in current Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge, on phones and computers, on stores served over HTTPS. Where the browser cannot record, the chat says voice is not supported and typing works as before.
- Voice has a budget per conversation. Up to 30 recordings and about ten minutes of spoken replies. After that, answers come as text only. A single reply is read for at most 90 seconds.
- Voice lives in the chat window. There is no phone number to call. We don't keep the recording; what the shopper said is saved as text, like a typed message.
See the shortlist and "Show more" on a stocked catalog at demo.emporiqa.com: ask "do you have smartwatches?" and tap through. The features page lists everything else the chat does. To try it on your own products, create a free Emporiqa account with $25 of signup credit (about 100 conversations) and without a card. Voice mode is there to switch on whenever you want it.
