As Bret Kinsella details in the summary of his latest report, smart speakers powered by Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri represented a white-hot consumer device market in the 2016-2019 period. Surging sales were accompanied by a deluge of popular culture appearances. However, high double-digit growth rates were replaced by low single digit growth the past two years. The pandemic didn’t help with smart speaker sales but the segment’s weakness was already evident in Voicebot’s national consumer survey in January 2020 before the world went into lockdown.
However, it is hard to say smart speakers are anything but an astounding success as a product category. There are now 95 million US adults that have at least one and 50% of device owners use them daily. That is a formidable product category with intense user loyalty.
The industry ramped up from zero devices in late 2014 to over 47 million users as of January 2018. The subsequent two years delivered nominal user base growth of 19 million and 21 million. For the past two years, the figures were 3.0 million and 4.2 million respectively. That’s a sizable nominal and relative decline. A post-2020 recession bounce-back did not occur — at least not yet.
Pandemic-related behavior changes actually led to an uptick in usage among the majority of smart speaker owners. That rise in usage has had some staying power but much of it reverted back to the pre-pandemic levels as consumers were able to get out of their homes more easily in the US.
This data and accompanying analysis can be found in Voicebot's fifth annual US Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report 2022.
Historically, the US market, as the first to have smart speakers, provided insight into how adoption in other countries was likely to play out 18 months to three years later. That difference may be compressing as US adoption slows and other markets continue their more deliberate adoption patterns as we saw from UK and Germany figures in 2021.
Still, the US provides insights into how other markets will develop as most of the new features and voice apps come to the US first. The question today is whether the 2.2% population adoption rise over the past two years can kick up again to something closer to the low double digits. If not, it may take three more years to achieve even 40% market penetration and there is no obvious path to 50% adoption.
The response to these developments from the tech giants that provide the leading smart speaker brands suggests they are forecasting slow growth. Marketing campaigns focused on driving up awareness and new user adoption are less common. Programs to drive more developer engagement are fewer. There appears to be a focus that began in late 2019 to extract more frequent usage out of existing device owners for the features that already exist as opposed to the previous emphasis on new users and new applications.
Third-party developers are the biggest casualty of these changes. The report details the trends associated with independent Alexa Skill and Google Action use along with consumer sentiment. All these developments and much more perspectives can be found in the full report and the free-to-download executive summary, which includes additional charts and analysis.
Voicebot's 2022 report on Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption, now available, chronicles this rise and stall of the device segment in 50 pages of analysis with over 40 charts and hundreds of data points. The report includes five years of data detailing these trends around consumer sentiment, adoption rates, and market share for Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Sonos, and others. It reflects the most in-depth analysis available about market size, market share, adoption demographics, and the use of smart speakers and conversational AI technologies in the home.
To download the fifth edition of the U.S. Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report - Visit the Voicebot Research website here
www.research.voicebot.ai
