Commentary
Smart Speaker Ownership Heading To 48% Of Consumers By End Of Year
- by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, September 10, 2018
Smart speakers are flooding the market and rather than just sitting on a shelf, they are being used.
About a third (32%) of consumers now own a smart speaker, up from 28% in January, according to a new survey of 1,000 U.S. adults by Adobe Analytics.
The majority (71%) of owners of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home use voice assistants at least daily, with 44% using them multiple times a day. Most (76%) smart speaker owners increased their usage of voice assistants in the last year, compared to 38% of non-owners.
While actual purchasing via smart speakers is not booming, shopping is. Almost half (47%) of smart speaker owners use voice assistants for product research, 43% to create shopping lists, 32% for price comparisons, 28% to research store information and 27% to check for deals and promotions.
The primary uses of voice assistants by those who own a smart speaker are as an assistant for music (70%), getting weather forecasts (64%) and setting alarms and reminders (46%).
Amazon and Google should be happy with the future for their respective smart speakers. Nearly half (45%) of smart speaker owners plan to purchase another smart speaker for themselves, and 23% plan to buy one for someone else during the upcoming holiday season.
The Adobe study concludes that after the upcoming holiday season, nearly half (48%) of U.S. consumers will own a smart speaker.
Smart speakers are mass market.
Chuck Martin is Editor of the AI & IoT Daily at MediaPost and writes the daily Connected Thinking column. He is a NY Times Business bestselling author and his latest book is “Digital Transformation 3.0” (The New Business-to-Consumer Connections of The Internet of Things.) He is CEO of Net Future Institute and a frequent keynote speaker internationally. Follow him on Twitter @chuckmartin and contact him at Chuck@MediaPost.com.
Uh oh. More poor research by Adobe - who is highly invested in some of these outcomes.
The primary thing we MUST remember about these studies is when they say "use voice assistants for product research" what they SHOULD SAY is that almost half once used their speaker for product research at some point - and 47% claimed to recall it in the past 6? 9? 12? months (but we know that recall on things like this are incredibly flakey).
Not much to see here. They're selling a lot of them. The trustworthy research shows their used for music (primary), weather (secondary), and sometimes for some kind of search (third). Shopping with them is essentially non-existent.
Right, Doug, looks like plenty of "shopping" activity but not of "buying" activity.
But aren't we forgetting that brands have not created compelling offerings yet for consumers to be incentivized to buy? Sure we'll see more in Q1 2019 when many use cases will be in market, and the low hanging fruit will disappear-- regardless of the vertical. Consumers want new things to do now, but they just aren't available yet so Q4 will be interesting to see what brands are taking advantage.
My sense, Doug, is we are not respecting the "average" consumers worry about their money. If someone has excellent disposable income, an error in voice ordering isn't a problem. But for the vast majority of consumers (75%?), they want pure control over every cent they spend.
My sense is this is why TV shopping by push button hasn't worked, it is the limiting factor on the theories about instagram ordering by hovering over the sweater, and it's one of the key limits on pay by mobile phone app. Even with decent income, I don't pay by phone app - becuase I don't trust it (rightly or wrongly doesn't matter). But I do pay Starbucks and my parking meters in Portland by app becuase they are narrow.
Anyway, all to say: There's a masive wall between this idea and consumer willingness. Especially when you add in daily experience with voice apps where "Call Mom" becomes "Calling the White House" or "Play Queeen" plays "Hail to the Queen".