Companies explore shopping by voice

NEW YORK — When the world shifted from personal computers to smartphones, websites had to slim down to work on smaller screens and slower wireless connections. A similar shift to voicecentric services is again forcing businesses to rethink how they present information to consumers — and spurring new efforts to help them do so.

The software company Adobe announced on Tuesday a new suite of tools that could help airlines, retailers and other companies create simple voice interfaces for travel and shopping. It’s not a simple task, since a voice-based digital assistant can’t really list dozens of flight options or hundreds of products. That means companies will have to winnow down those choices to the travel options or products people are most likely to want.

The technology is still in its infancy and Adobe doesn’t have any actual corporate partners to showcase yet. But its announcement shows that voice assistants are becoming important channels for reaching consumers.

Adobe’s new voice service will work with all major voice assistants. It will limit its analysis to data provided by the company people are shopping at, instead of trying to pull together a more comprehensive personal profile from multiple sources. That will limit the accuracy of its personalization, but Adobe believes consumers won’t be comfortable with broader profiling yet.