VOICE ASSISTANTS: STATE OF THE MARKET
In early 2017 Mike Jeffs, the Commercial Director for Branded3, put together a nice article called “OK Google, Siri, Alexa, Cortana; Can you tell me some stats on voice search?” that summarizes where VAs are in terms of market uptake and outlook. Here are some of the stats from that meticulously researched piece:
Rate of Adoption, Statistics from Third Quarter, 2017:
“40% of adults now use voice search once per day” Location World
“In May 2016, 1 in 5 searches on an Android app in the USA were through speech” KPCB
“25% of 16-24s use voice search on mobile” Global Web Index
“41% of people using voice search have only started in the last 6 months” MindMeld
“9% of users said that they’ve used AI personal assistants like Siri or Cortana in the past day” AYTM
“1 in 5 online adults have used voice search on their mobile in the last month” Global Web Index
“We estimate that 325.8 million people used voice control in the past month” Global Web Index (~10% of online users Internet Stats).
“Only around a third of smartphone owners use their personal assistants regularly, even though 95% have tried them at some point.” Creative Strategies via The Economist
“65 percent of people who own an Amazon Echo or Google Home can’t imagine to going back to the days before they had a smart speaker.” Geomarketing.com
“42 percent say voice-activated devices have quickly become “essential” to their lives.” Geomar
Future Growth Predictions
“50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020” according to comscore
“About 30% of searches will be done without a screen by 2020.” via Mediapos
“We estimate there will be 21.4 million smart speakers in the US by 2020” according to Activate
“By 2019, the voice recognition market will be a $601 million industry,” according to a report from Technavio via Skyword.
“This year (2017), 25 million devices will be shipped, bringing the total number of voice-first devices to 33 million in circulation.” based on a new study by VoiceLabs via Mediapost
Usage Patterns & Error Rates
“Nearly 50% of people are now using voice search when researching products.” via Social Media Today
“High consumer usage of voice assistants in autos (51%) and household (39%) indicates increased comfort with the technology” – according to Activate via WSJ.
“Google’s AI has been reading nearly 3,000 romance novels in order to improve its conversational search abilities” via Click Hub
‘Personal assistants’ is the top marketing search of 2016″ according to Bing via Econsultancy
“Humans can speak 150 words per minute vs type 40 words per minute” via Katherine Watier
“28% think voice search is a more accurate way of searching” and “43% cite that using voice search is quicker than using a website or an app” via Katherine Watier
“42% say that use while driving is a reason for using voice search” Katherine Watier
“21% don’t like typing on their mobile phone and so turn to voice search” via Katherine Watier and Statista, 2015 (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)
“Today, speech recognition word error rate is 8 percent.” via Bruce Clay
“Fifteen years ago quality had stalled, with word-error rates of 20-30%. Microsoft’s latest system, which has six neural networks running in parallel, has reached 5.9% (see chart), the same as a human transcriber’s.” via The Economist
