Voicebot.ai survey: 87.7 million U.S. adults have smart speakers

Voicebot.ai has released its latest report on U.S. smart speaker adoption. According to its most recent surveys, the U.S. smart speaker install base has grown 32% to 87.7 million adults. The result marks an adoption rate of 34.4%, which has slowed from 40% in 2018.

Amazon is still the market leader, but its share of the U.S. market dropped to 53% in January 2020. That’s down from 61.1% in the same month of 2019 and 71.9% in 2018. As Amazon’s dominance has waned, Google’s has been growing. The company’s share has grown from 18.4% in January 2018 to 30.9% in 2020. Sonos was the other notable growth story, edging up its share from 2.2% in January 2019 to 4.7% this January. Apple’s portion held steady over the past year.

The report found that listening to streaming music is still the leading activity for smart speaker owners. A large majority of 88.7% have ever tried it, while 73.6% do so monthly and 39.8% listen daily. While streaming music was the top activity, the survey revealed a broad range of uses for smart speakers. Radio listening has a 19% share of daily users, and while podcasting and other talk formats had 11.4% daily use.

The survey also revealed that discovery of voice apps is still a challenge for users. More than half (53%) said they don’t discover voice apps. That rate is down for two consecutive years. The only areas of third-party voice app discovery were social media and advertising, although both only saw 1% increases.

Anna Washenko