Survey: Half of U.S. adults have tried a voice assistant behind the wheel

Voicebot.ai and Cerence released a report about the use of voice assistants in cars. According to the survey of 1,090 U.S. adults, more people are using voice assistants in cars than on smart speakers. Just over half (50.9%) of U.S. adults, or about 129.7 million people, have used any kind of voice assistant in their vehicles. About a third of the adult population, or 83.8 million people, are monthly active users of voice while driving.

Those figures are on the rise, compared with survey results from September 2018. The report cited growing availability of voice assistants through aftermarket and first-party infotainment dashboards and a wider array of services as reasons for the growth. It also noted that growing use of voice assistants on other hardware could be increasing familiarity, which would boost in-car use.

The largest share of in-car voice assistant use is of whatever solution is embedded into a car, with 33.2% of the responses. The second most-common response was use of a smartphone voice assistant via Bluetooth at 30.5%. More than a quarter (26.7%) of respondents said they use Apple’s Siri/CarPlay from their dashboard. Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa in the dashboard trailed with just 7.5% and 2%, respectively.

The most common activity for in-car voice assistants was making a phone call with 73% of the overall use cases. Starting music had a 27% share of overall use, while starting a radio station was 14% and starting a podcast was 10.8%. The survey didn’t specify any additional playback controls in this segment of the results.