The smart speaker revolution isn’t quite here yet

A survey on voice assistant use in the US reveals the majority of consumers hardly ever use smart voice assistants and even when they do it’s on a smartphone.

The survey was conducted by digital commerce strategy firm Sumo Heavy. It chatted to around a thousand US punters to find out what their voice assistant habits are. The first thing it found was that 46% have never used  voice assistant and that 19% do so rarely, which probably means they did it once out of curiosity and concluded they didn’t fancy it.

So that means less than a third of US consumers use voice assistants with any regularity. Considering this sort of technology hit the mainstream when Siri was pre-integrated into the iPhone 4S back in 2011, it would be a stretch to say voice assistant adoption has exploded in the intervening 8 years.

The same could be said for smart speakers, which had their mainstream launch in 2014 with the launch of the first Amazon Echo. We have been led to believe they achieved near ubiquity in the subsequent 4-5 years but this survey begs to differ. By far the most common way of accessing voice assistants is smartphones, with smart speakers accounting for less than a fifth.

Unsurprisingly those people that do own smart speakers (Amazon is the clear market leader) use the voice assistant fairly frequently, with over half doing so at least once per week. Iphone users seem more into voice assistants than Android ones. Only 42% of regular voice assistant users ever buy stuff that way, but if they do it’s likely to domestic products or things like movie tickets.