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Google Cloud Retail Germany

OTTO

Customer Service Automation

To create deeper engagement and better advice, OTTO needed a native audio experience built for real conversation.

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A text chatbot would provide the foundation, but voice was the interface that could make digital consultation feel natural. Google had been a development partner since earlier 2023 experiments. With Gemini's emerging capabilities and…
In November 2024, the team set out to build a true advisory experience and identified voice early on as the interface best suited to that ambition. The hypothesis was simple: spoken conversation could create deeper engagement, encourage…
OTTO is the largest German online retailer, offering ~19 million products from both its own wholesale business and 6,100 marketplace partners. Its history runs through every major wave of retail change, from the thousand-page printed…
Scaled expert product advisory from 5 to 50 categories—and growing

Reported impact

Business outcome

First EMEA retailer with native voice shopping live in production; Voice assistant available across ~19 million products; Scaled expert product advisory from 5 to 50 categories—and growing

  • Customer Experience
  • Productivity Improvement
  • Scalability

Solution

To create deeper engagement and better advice, OTTO needed a native audio experience built for real conversation. The breakthrough came in November 2025, when Gemini Live had matured enough for production. OTTO rebuilt the voice path on the Live API with native audio. Instead of cascading text into speech, two models now run in parallel: the text assistant continues to… Keeping that fluency under control required something new. OTTO's engineers in Hamburg, with hands-on support from Google's product and engineering teams, built an orchestration layer drawn from formal methods—the kind used to verify concurrent systems, not… Key components include Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform coordinates multi-agent workflows, tool calling, and governed automation across the application; Gemini Live API provides the reasoning or generation layer used for classification, orchestration, content generation, or analysis; (Native Audio) supports a core part of the deployed AI and data workflow.

Solution architecture

7 components · 3 layers
  1. Compute
    • Gemini Live API Provides the reasoning or generation layer used for classification, orchestration, content generation, or analysis.
    • Gemini 2.5 Flash Provides the reasoning or generation layer used for classification, orchestration, content generation, or analysis.
    • Gemini 3 Pro Provides the reasoning or generation layer used for classification, orchestration, content generation, or analysis.
    • Chirp 3 Provides the reasoning or generation layer used for classification, orchestration, content generation, or analysis.
    • Gemini 2.5 Provides the reasoning or generation layer used for classification, orchestration, content generation, or analysis.
  2. Orchestration
    • Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform Coordinates multi-agent workflows, tool calling, and governed automation across the application.
  3. Uncategorized
    • (Native Audio) Supports a core part of the deployed AI and data workflow described in the customer story.

Architecture clues

  • In November 2024, the team set out to build a true advisory experience and identified voice early on as the interface best suited to that ambition. The hypothesis was simple: spoken conversation could create deeper…
  • OTTO is the largest German online retailer, offering ~19 million products from both its own wholesale business and 6,100 marketplace partners. Its history runs through every major wave of retail change, from the…
  • The advisory pattern itself scales. OTTO began with five product categories hand-crafted alongside category experts, then used Gemini to extend the same structure to fifty more, with the next wave covering the full…
  • The breakthrough came in November 2025, when Gemini Live had matured enough for production. OTTO rebuilt the voice path on the Live API with native audio. Instead of cascading text into speech, two models now run in…
  • The voice assistant entered open beta in early May 2026. Production data is only days old at the time of writing, but early customer behavior already validates the central design bet. In voice mode, customers tell the…

Evidence from the source

First EMEA retailer with native voice shopping live in production
OTTO became Europe's first retailer with a native voice shopping assistant, turning expert advice into a real conversation.
OTTO is the largest German online retailer, offering ~19 million products from both its own wholesale business and 6,100 marketplace partners. Its history runs through every major wave of retail change, from the…
Scaled expert product advisory from 5 to 50 categories—and growing
Search has always been a powerful tool, but it answers in lists. A customer typing "washing machine" gets thousands of results and starts filtering. A customer who wants advice—"What's a quiet machine for a…
Voice assistant available across ~19 million products
Transparency Evidence & methodology 91/100 reference value · 77% confidence · 1 source

Review how this reference was scored and trace each normalized claim back to its documented source.

01

Scoring methodology

How scores are calculated

Customer Reference Value measures usefulness as a customer reference. Evidence Confidence measures the quality and traceability of available evidence, not independent verification.

Customer reference value91/100
  • Problem clarity20/20
    Measures whether the customer's operational problem is specific enough to compare.
  • Implementation depth20/25
    Rewards named components, data flow, integrations, and architecture detail.
  • Outcome specificity16/20
    Measures whether the reported benefit is concrete rather than a generic claim.
  • Quantified impact25/25
    2 metrics describe measurable impact.
  • Deployment scale10/10
    Rewards evidence of a live or scaled deployment and meaningful integration scope.
Evidence confidence77%
  • Source authority20/25
    The main evidence is an official vendor-published customer story.
  • Claim traceability21/25
    10 of 12 key fields link to a named source.
  • Direct evidence20/20
    6 direct source quotes retained.
  • Date provenance0/10
    The publication date has no documented provenance.
  • Source transparency8/10
    1 source reference document publisher, URL, authority, retrieval, and supported fields.
  • Implementation specificity8/10
    Rewards source-backed components, data flow, quantified impact, and a specific outcome.
02

Traceability

Sources & provenance

Field coverage shows which facts each source supports. Dates are shown only when documented by the source.

  1. Google Cloud

    OTTO customer story

    First-party
    https://cloud.google.com/customers/otto-voice-shopping-ai
    Source type
    Vendor-published customer story
    Supports
    • Customer
    • Business problem
    • Solution
    • Products
    • Solution components
    • Data flow
    • Integrations
    • technical area
    • use case category
    • Business outcome
    • outcome category
    • Metrics
    • Architecture
    • evidence quotes

Date evidence

  • Sitemap last modified Sep 16, 2026 · Google Cloud · Publisher metadata Publisher-reported modification timestamp; not a publication date.
    Open date source
  • Unverified extracted date Sep 16, 2026 · Google Cloud · Unknown Legacy extracted date without source-page confirmation.
    Open date source
Not separately sourced Industry, Region, Company size. Treat these normalized attributes as lower-confidence until a dedicated source is added.

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