Updated Research: The State of Smart Speakers
From listening to music to controlling appliances in their homes, users are expanding how they use voice in their everyd...
Whether you call them “smart speakers,” “voice-enabled speakers,” or “voice assistants,” there’s no denying we’re witnessing the birth of a major new technology category. More than 35M Americans already use a smart speaker at least 1x/month—a 129% increase over 2016. Gartner predicts 75% of households will have a smart speaker by 2020.
So what’s going on with smart speakers, what’s working, what's not working, what does the future hold, and what should brands consider when surveying this new landscape?
At AnswerLab, questions like this are our reason for being. To answer them for ourselves and our clients, we conducted multi-method research with smart speaker owners to understand not just what they want, but how speaker owners currently behave and why.
A survey of 1000 smart speaker owners and time spent in the homes of 10 owners provide the insights for our Great Voice Experiences Start with Listening: Best Practices in Research and Design for Voice User Interfaces report.
Findings in the report include:
- The current state of smart speaker applications - and what it means for brands
- How brands should approach developing voice applications
- Why Domino's "Dom" skill was so popular with users
- Common UX mistakes most VUIs are making and how to avoid them
- How to conduct research on smart speakers / voice UIs
The big takeaway for businesses is that consumers expect big brands to have a presence in smart speakers. Consumers want to interact with brands in ways that are relevant to them and that leverage the unique opportunities of the platform. As more people adopt these devices, brands need to consider whether and how smart speaker skills /actions fit into their product road map .
For more insights and recommendations, download the report here.