Living room, bedroom and kitchens remain to be the most popular locations where consumers place smart speakers, Voicebot says in the recently published Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report.
Living room, bedroom and kitchens remain to be the most popular locations where consumers place smart speakers, Voicebot says in the recently published Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report.
For the second straight year, the living room was the most common location for smart speakers. At just under 45% it was ahead of the bedroom at 37.6%, which had about the same percentage as last year. The third place went to the kitchen, at right around 33%.
Other popular locations are home office (14.4%), dining room (6.5%), bathroom (6.2%) and garage (2.3%).
It is interesting that Amazon Prime and Gmail users are more likely to own smart speakers. Amazon Prime members are 50% more likely to own a smart speaker and more likely to own an
Echo branded device. Gmail users are about 31% more likely than all users to own a smart speaker. However, Gmail users are no more likely than other users to own a
Google Home device.
Popular use cases
In terms of smart speaker use cases, asking a question, listening to streaming music and checking the weather are the top three choices, leading other use cases by a large margin.
Asking general questions essentially turns a smart speaker into an interactive voice search engine. Music related questions are by far the most common, followed by news and movie topics.
The next tier of questions clusters the 20-30% range of users range from asking for how-to instructions and product information to retail store hours and science.
Topics that are far less common include work-related information, finance and investing and fashion. These were all registered by 5% or fewer smart speaker owners.
Smart home use case
Smart home use cases were a notable mover between 2018 and 2019. In 2018, it was the fourteenth most common use case but it rose to ninth in 2019.
Over 45% of smart speaker owners have used them to control smart home devices, up from 38% in 2018. Also, one third of smart speaker owners report doing so on a monthly basis, up from 30% in 2017.
It was once assumed that smart speaker adoption would be driven by smart home users. However, now it seemed it is the other way around. The large audience of smart speaker owners may be the catalyst for further smart home adoption.
More than 55% of smart speaker owners say they have at least one smart home device that they control by voice.
However, not every smart speaker owner has such interest. Voicebot says one in five consumers with smart home devices have never tried to control them with smart speakers.
The most popular smart home devices are
smart TVs (33.3%), followed by
smart lighting (21.2%), voice interactive game consoles and cable boxes (14.4%) and
smart thermostats (12.4%). Rounding out the top five were
video doorbells (10.5%).
Smart speaker as customer service portal
Companies are starting to think about how smart speakers can help address common customer service questions. At a basic level, this could be an FAQ from a company’s website repurposed for voice.
The goal would be providing customer convenience and deflect inbound call center contacts when practical.
Survey shows 31.4% of consumers would like to be able to use their smart speakers to contact customer service. Another 30% are unsure. This means more than 20 million American adults are interested in doing this and a comparable amount are open to it.
This could be a significant opportunity for customer service departments to increase customer satisfaction and help them resolve issues more quickly.