Smart Speakers Make Inroads Into American Homes

Source: Statista

When Amazon announced the Amazon Echo in 2014, many people laughed at the idea of voluntarily letting the world’s largest online retailer put a “listening device” in your home. And yet, the Echo, and Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa with it, became a major success, pioneering the smart speaker market in the United States and internationally.

According to a recent statement, Amazon shipped more than 100 million Echo devices since 2014, making it the leader in the highly contested smart speaker market. According to the latest edition of NPR and Edison Research’s “Smart Audio Report” more than 50 million Americans aged 18+ owned at least one smart speaker by the end of 2018, illustrating that initial privacy concerns were quickly cast aside by curiosity and the futuristic allure of having a voice assistant at home.

Interestingly, 52 percent of smart speaker owners in the United States have more than one device in their home, indicating a high degree of satisfaction with their smart household helpers.

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Google Gains Ground in the Smart Speaker Market

Thanks to its head start in the prospering smart speaker market, Amazon stayed on top of the competition in the first quarter of 2018. According to the latest estimates from market research firm Strategy Analytics, the e-commerce giant shipped 4 million Echo devices in the first three months of the year, edging out its closest competitor Google by 1.6 million units.

Having extended its smart speaker line-up last year, Google gained some ground on Amazon though, growing its market share from 12.4 percent in the first quarter of 2017 to 26.5 percent in Q1 2018. Apple meanwhile failed to break into the Top 3 as the company shipped an estimated 600,000 HomePods between its release on February 9 and March 30.

Overall, the smart speaker market continues to grow, with global shipments nearly quadrupling from 2.4 to 9.2 million units year-over-year.

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Are Smart Speakers the Key to the Smart Home?

Source: Statista

With Amazon and Google having slashed the prices of their respective smart speakers this holiday season, it doesn’t take a prophet to predict that voice-enabled speakers will feature prominently under Christmas trees in the United States and elsewhere this year. With prices starting as low as $29.99 for the entry-level Echo Dot, price is no longer an obstacle on voice assistants’ way to mainstream adoption.

According to a recent comScore report, smart speaker penetration among U.S. households has risen from 8 percent in June to 11 percent in October and is expected to reach 15 percent early next year. What’s interesting though, is the fact that smart speakers could turn out to be the long-missing key to broader adoption of other smart home products as well. As our chart, based on comScore findings, illustrates, smart speaker households are much more likely to own other smart devices such as smart lighting systems or smart thermostats.

While comScore concludes that “the smart speaker is the gateway device to enabling a smart home for many consumers”, it has to be noted that this is a classic chicken or egg problem insofar as there is no way to tell whether early adopters of other smart home equipment are more likely to have jumped on the smart assistant bandwagon early or whether buying a smart speaker has convinced many people to smarten up their entire homes.

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