INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
It may well seem like you can’t move without knocking over an Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant smart speaker at the moment, and that’s
because the market adoption is moving at a staggering rate, if a new YouGov poll is to be believed.We already knew that millions of
Amazon’s speakers have made their way into our homes, with a January 2018 poll indicating that one in six Americans now owns a smart
This time it’s the UK’s turn, with a poll that shows adoption of smart speakers has doubled over a period of six months.Apparently
it’s gone from a nation where 5% of all homes had a smart speaker in Q3 of 2017, to 10% in Q1 of 2018
One in ten is still quite a bit behind the Americans, but it just goes to show the rising popularity of these devices.Losing the lion's
shareAnother interesting note is that Amazon’s popularity is apparently slipping slightly, with its overall percentage of smart speakers
dropping from a vast 88% of the whole market, down to 75%. That’s still three quarters of the market owned by a single company, but it
shows that it’s certainly not the only horse in the race
Google Assistant speakers and Apple’s HomePod are now giving Amazon’s Echo range a run for its money, as well as the plethora of other,
third-party speakers.Now, as always with polls, these findings are taken from a group of people (in this case a little over 2,000) and
extrapolating the numbers, so it’s possible that ownership could actually be less, or more, but it’s still interesting to see this
emerging technology really start to actually emerge.
