smart-speaker-use

3 Charts Show How People Use Smart Speakers

There is a new chart from Business Insider by way of Statista by way of comScore on how people use smart speakers today. That was a mouthful. However, the nicely rendered chart provides another data point for us to compare with previous studies.

Amazon Echo Use Cases

63 Percent Use Amazon Echo for Music

What is Common

The first two studies from comScore and GfK were conducted in early 2017 and the Experian study was from 2016 so we may seem evolution over time. However, music is common across all three as a top performer. Not surprising given that it is a speaker and audio entertainment is an obvious use case. Two of the three cited setting a timer near the top of the list and one didn’t ask the question. Again weather and asking questions is high for two but appears not to have been asked by the Experian study.

Home automation solutions also come in around the middle of consumer use cases for all three studies. This may surprise some people who saw the early promise of smart speaker based voice assistants as a control point for smart homes. It has become that solution in many households, but not all consumers are adopting smart home technology.

Similarly, ordering products from smart speaker voice assistants is relatively low for both studies. Both studies appear to place the frequency of the use case at around 10-11%.

What is Different

There really isn’t much difference among the findings from comScore and GfK. The questions were asked differently but the use cases fall in a relatively similar range. One item that does stand out  is that comScore asked about games. Game usage came in at 14% of responses. Voicebot recently broke the story that Amazon started a program to pay game developers based on user base and frequency of play. It will be interesting to see if investment in this space changes the consumer adoption audio-based gaming.

If you are hungry for more data like this, check out Voicebot’s stats pages for Amazon Echo / Alexa and Google Home / Assistant.

GfK Says Only 3 Percent of US Consumers to Buy Amazon Echo or Google Home in 2017

Experian Study Sheds Light on How People Use Amazon Echo