NPR Study Says 118 Million Smart Speakers Owned by U.S. Adults
NPR and Edison Research have released new data showing that U.S. households have acquired 118.5 million smart speakers through the end of 2018. That is up 78% from the end of 2017 when the company’s estimated 66.7 million devices were in use in the U.S. The data suggest that U.S. smart speaker owners now have an average of 2.3 devices each.
This data comes on the heels of Amazon’s David Limp acknowledging that the Alexa-enabled devices now exceed 100 million worldwide. Smart speakers are just one voice assistant access point but are increasingly prevalent in the home. NPR and Edison data suggest that about 21% of U.S. adults now have access to a smart speaker. Voicebot survey data show this number is higher, but the difference may be the result of different sampling or how the question is asked. We will have an update on this next week.
More Than Half of Smart Speaker Owners Have More Than One
The study found that there were about 14 million new smart speaker owners in the U.S. in 2018 which means the sale of smart speakers to existing device owners is growing at a faster rate than new users are being added. Another finding is that 52% of smart speaker owners have more than one device. In 2017, only 38% of smart speaker owners had more than one device according to NPR.
The big driver for this rise was the increase in the ratio of smart speaker owners with three or more devices. In December 2017 this group of device owners was only 17% while one year later it was 30%. You can download the full report here.
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