China accounts for over 50% of smart speaker shipments

"China has surpassed the United States to lead the smart speaker market.
According to new data from Canalys, China’s smart speaker shipments grew by 500 percent in Q1 2019 to achieve a 51 percent market share. The U.S. has dropped to a 24 percent market share in the same quarter, down from its 44 percent share in Q4 2018.
Baidu, for example, shipped 3.3 million speakers, bolstered by an exclusive sponsorship deal with China’s national TV channel, CCTV, on its New Year’s Gala on Chinese New Year’s Eve. The promotion prompted users to download the Baidu app, which handed out more than 100 million coupons. The company is now in third place in smart speaker shipments, behind Amazon at 4.6 million and Google at 3.5 million. Alibaba and Xiaomi each had 3.2 million shipments, with both benefiting from Chinese New Year promotions."

Source:  PYMNTS, 21st May 2019

97% of US smart speaker households only own one brand

"New research from Parks Associates finds smart speakers inspire strong brand loyalty among owners—97% of smart speaker households own only one brand in this device category. 360 Deep Dive: Consumer Demand for High-End Entertainment Devices reveals two-thirds of smart speaker households own an Echo device, while almost one-third own a Google Home. Low-end models such as the Echo Dot and Google Home Mini are the most common products owned, but the trend of brand loyalty in this early market creates opportunities for device makers to upsell premium products.
“More than 50% of U.S. broadband households bought at least one CE product in the past year, and close to one-third (16% of all U.S. broadband households) spent more than $1,000 on CE purchases in that time,” said Kristen Hanich, Research Analyst, Parks Associates. “These top and high spenders are willing to pay a premium for high-end products and can be drawn to products that will impress their friends and neighbors. Ownership of many high-end devices overlaps, particularly among newer product categories such as smart speakers or high-end tethered VR systems, so device makers can follow the demographics to target these top-dollar consumers when designing and promoting their premium-tier products.”"

Source:  Parks Associates, 5th Feb 2019

More than 100m devices with Amazon Alexa have been sold

"More than 100 million devices with Alexa on board have been sold. That’s the all-too-rare actual number that Amazon’s SVP of devices and services, Dave Limp, revealed to me earlier this week. That’s not to say Amazon has finally decided to be completely transparent about device sales, however. While the company claims it outstripped its most optimistic expectations for the Echo Dot during the holiday season, Limp wouldn’t give a number for that. Instead, Limp says, Amazon is sold out of Dots through January, despite "pushing pallets of Echo Dots onto 747s and getting them from Hong Kong to here as quickly as we possibly could.""

Source:  The Verge, 4th January 2019

Note - I'd assume that at least 95% of these would be Echo devices

Also - Amazon has over 10,000 employees working on either Echo or Alexa

Also - There are now over 55,000 'skills' (apps), up 120% year on year

Amazon Alexa works with 20,000 devices

"Amazon executive Daniel Rausch stood onstage before a crowd of hundreds at Berlin's IFA tech show Saturday to share a few big numbers about Alexa.
"Just this year," he said, "Alexa has sung Happy Birthday millions of times to customers, and she's told over 100 million jokes."
Maybe Alexa, Amazon's voice assistant, hasn't sung Happy Birthday to you just yet, but -- considering the way things are going -- there's a good chance it'll get invited to your next birthday celebration.
At the start of this year, Alexa worked with over 4,000 devices. Rausch, Amazon's vice president of smart home, said Saturday that Alexa is now integrated with over 20,000 devices -- a fivefold increase in just eight months. The number of brands using Alexa shot up to over 3,500 from 1,200 during the same time."

Source:  CNET, 1st September 2018

Amazon''s share of smart speaker shipments has fallen from 76% to 41%

"According to the latest quarterly research from Strategy Analytics, Amazon’s global smart speaker share of shipments fell to 41% in Q2 2018 from 44% in Q1 and 76% in Q2 2017. By contrast Google has increased its share to 28% in Q2 2018, up from 16% during the same period last year. Alibaba finished third with Apple and JD.com rounding out the top five. Strategy Analytics’ latest smart speaker report “Smart Speaker Vendor & OS Shipment and Installed Base Market Share by Region: Q2 2018” provides detailed quarterly metrics for the top twenty smart speaker vendors and leading fourteen voice operating systems worldwide."

Source:  BusinessWire, 13th August 2018

Amazon has more than 100m Prime Members

"Prime – 13 years post-launch, we have exceeded 100 million paid Prime members globally. In 2017 Amazon shipped more than five billion items with Prime worldwide, and more new members joined Prime than in any previous year – both worldwide and in the U.S. Members in the U.S. now receive unlimited free two-day shipping on over 100 million different items. We expanded Prime to Mexico, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and introduced Business Prime Shipping in the U.S. and Germany. We keep making Prime shipping faster as well, with Prime Free Same-Day and Prime Free One-Day delivery now in more than 8,000 cities and towns. Prime Now is available in more than 50 cities worldwide across nine countries. Prime Day 2017 was our biggest global shopping event ever (until surpassed by Cyber Monday), with more new Prime members joining Prime than any other day in our history.
[...]
Marketplace – In 2017, for the first time in our history, more than half of the units sold on Amazon worldwide were from our third-party sellers, including small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Over 300,000 U.S.-based SMBs started selling on Amazon in 2017, and Fulfillment by Amazon shipped billions of items for SMBs worldwide. Customers ordered more than 40 million items from SMBs worldwide during Prime Day 2017, growing their sales by more than 60 percent over Prime Day 2016. Our Global Selling program (enabling SMBs to sell products across national borders) grew by over 50% in 2017 and cross-border ecommerce by SMBs now represents more than 25% of total third-party sales.
Alexa – Customer embrace of Alexa continues, with Alexa-enabled devices among the best-selling items across all of Amazon. We’re seeing extremely strong adoption by other companies and developers that want to create their own experiences with Alexa. There are now more than 30,000 skills for Alexa from outside developers, and customers can control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1,200 unique brands with Alexa. The foundations of Alexa continue to get smarter every day too. We’ve developed and implemented an on-device fingerprinting technique, which keeps your device from waking up when it hears an Alexa commercial on TV. (This technology ensured that our Alexa Super Bowl commercial didn’t wake up millions of devices.) Far-field speech recognition (already very good) has improved by 15% over the last year; and in the U.S., U.K., and Germany, we’ve improved Alexa’s spoken language understanding by more than 25% over the last 12 months through enhancements in Alexa’s machine learning components and the use of semi-supervised learning techniques. (These semi-supervised learning techniques reduced the amount of labeled data needed to achieve the same accuracy improvement by 40 times!) Finally, we’ve dramatically reduced the amount of time required to teach Alexa new languages by using machine translation and transfer learning techniques, which allows us to serve customers in more countries (like India and Japan)."

Source:  Taken from Amazon's quarterly letter to shareholders, 18th April 2018

16% of Americans own a smart speaker

"One in six Americans now own a smart speaker, according to new research out this week from NPR and Edison Research – a figure that’s up 128 percent from January, 2017. Amazon’s Echo speakers are still in the lead, the report says, as 11 percent now own an Amazon Alexa device compared with 4 percent who own a Google Home product.
Today, 16 percent of Americans own a smart speaker, or around 39 million people.
The holiday shopping season also seemed to have played a role in the increased adoption of smart devices in the U.S., with 7 percent of Americans reporting they acquired at least one smart speaker between Black Friday and the end of December, and 4 percent saying they acquired their first smart speaker during the holidays."

Source:  Techcrunch, 12th January 2018

Most Amazon Alexa users 'only use their device for basic tasks'

"A management-consulting firm recently looked at heavy users of virtual assistants, defined as people who use one more than three times a day. The firm, called Activate, found that the majority of these users turned to virtual assistants to play music, get the weather, set a timer or ask questions.
Activate also found that the majority of Alexa users had never used more than the basic apps that come with the device, although Amazon said its data suggested that 4 out of 5 registered Alexa customers have used at least one of the more than 30,000 “skills” — third-party apps that tap into Alexa’s voice controls to accomplish tasks — it makes available.
But while some hard-core fans are indeed tapping into advanced features of virtual assistants, like controlling the lights in their homes, for the most part, “people are still using these speakers for very routine tasks,” said Michael J. Wolf, founder of Activate. “It’s not clear that there is something that’s going to drive people to use these.”"
Source:  The Seattle Times, 21st January 2018

Amazon Echo owners in the US spend an estimated $1,700 a year with Amazon

"Amazon Echo owners are among the eCommerce giant’s most loyal customers — and the most frequent of its shoppers, according to Wednesday (Jan. 3) reports from CNBC.
That’s according to new research from equity securities research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, which noted owners of Amazon’s Echo smart speakers spend $1,700 on average each year on Amazon, higher than the $1,300 Amazon Prime customers spend annually. What’s more, the figure is 66 percent higher than the average spending rate of all Amazon customers around the globe.
“We’ve long thought that Amazon is keenly focused on building increasingly loyal and frequent shopping customers, and Echo seems to promote that goal,”  CIRP’s co-founder Josh Lowitz said in the report. “Based on the spending patterns of Echo owners, Amazon can certainly subsidize sales its Echo devices.”
Consumer Intelligence Research Partners polled 2,000 U.S. Amazon customers during a 12-month period that ended in September. The researchers found the huge spending on the part of Echo customers is one of the reasons Amazon has been slashing prices on Echo devices, and is also why the eCommerce giant is rolling out different Echo devices — including one with a screen."
Source:  PYMTS, 4th January 2018

There were over 17bn live video chats on Messenger in 2017

"Overall, there were 17 billion realtime video chats on Messenger, marking two times as many video chat sessions in 2017 compared to 2016."
Source:  Facebook, 13th December 2017

WeChat users send 38bn messages per day

"The chatty users of WeChat have just set a new record, sending 38 billion messages per day. That’s 25 percent more than last year.
[WhatsApp has 55bn per day]
Tencent, maker of WeChat, also revealed a few more stats today in its 2017 WeChat Data Report:
6.1 billion voice messages sent each day
205 million video and voice calls daily
50 million “seniors” – age 55-70 – are active users
3.5 million active “official accounts,” used by brands, media outlets, bloggers, and celebrities
797 million users actively browse through content from official accounts"

Source:  Tech in Asia, 9th November 2017

More in WeChat's 2017 Data Report

Google Home is 6x more likely to be able to answer a question that Amazon Alexa

"New York-based 360i has developed software to determine how well Google Home and Amazon Alexa execute exchanges with human beings. The initial results from the agency, which is part of Dentsu Aegis Network, are intriguing.
So far, Google Home is six times more likely to answer your question than Amazon Alexa. It’s relatively surprising, considering that RBC Capital Markets projects Alexa will drive $10 billion of revenue to Amazon by 2020—not to mention the artificial intelligence-based system currently owns 70 percent of the voice market.
360i’s proprietary software asked both devices 3,000 questions to come to the figure. While Amazon Alexa has shown considerable strength in retail search during the agency’s research, Google won the day thanks to its unmatched search abilities."

Source:  AdWeek, 23rd June 2017

12% of US broadband households have an Amazon Echo or similar device

"Parks Associates today announced new smart home research showing that the adoption rate of smart speakers with voice assistants grew from 5% of U.S. broadband households in Q4 2015 to 12% in Q4 2016. Voice Assistants and Technologies: Ecosystem and Market Leaders examines the growing market for these smart home devices and the impact of voice control as a major market transformation in both the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI).
“In the past five years, voice control and voice-based technologies have experienced massive growth in the consumer market, igniting the competitive landscape among current and emerging smart home players,” said Dina Abdelrazik, Research Analyst, Parks Associates. “Voice interfaces are advancing due to continued improvements in machine learning and natural language processing, paired with the prevalence of portable devices. Apple increased consumer familiarity of voice control with its introduction of Siri in 2011, but the later-to-market Amazon Alexa has taken a clear lead in this category.”"
Source:  Parks Associates, 21st March 2017

More than 10,000 'skills' (apps) have been developed for Amazon Alexa

"If voice assistants really are the next big user interface, then Amazon is off to fantastic start — by the numbers, at least. As this chart from Statista shows, Amazon’s Alexa assistant now has more than 10,000 “skills” (i.e., third-party voice-enabled applications). That’s double the amount that was available just last quarter.
To be clear: That developers are interested in Alexa is good news for Amazon, and Alexa itself seems to be well ahead in the home compared to rivals like Google Assistant, the AI found in the Google Home speaker that competes directly with the Alexa-centric Amazon Echo.
But, as always, quantity isn’t quality. Calling up an Uber or ordering a pizza just by yelling across the room is convenient enough, but for every useful skill, there are 500 CorkOrnaments.com deal alerts or “Flat Earth Facts.”"

Source:  Business Insider, 27th February 2017

The Amazon Echo has sold an estimated 3m units in the US

"Many products seem fascinating to geeks and techies but fail to catch on with wider audiences, from dual-booting smartphones to smart blowdryers. However, the Amazon Echo seems to be a real hit, with a new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimating the retail giant has sold 3 million of the smart speakers.
The Amazon Echo, which uses the cloud-based AI Alexa to answer queries, control smart home devices and play games with users, has seen plenty of support from Amazon, with new abilities added almost every week. But consumers seem to have seen the value as well."

Source:  Geekwire, 6th April 2016

Regular smartphone communication methods in major countries

Source:  Ofcom's International Communications Market Report, December 2015
Full document is here

Most VOIP calls now happen on mobile

Source:  Ofcom's Communications Market Report, August 2015
Full report here
All charts here

What teens & adults use voice search for in the US

Source:  Data from Google, quoted in Digital Marketing Magazine, 15th June 2015
Original source:  Google & Northstar Research, based on a study of 1,400 Americans in 2014

Siri processes 1bn requests a week (& more Apple stats)

"The company reported that its App Store has crossed 100 billion app downloads, with $30 billion being paid out to developers so far.
In terms of adoption of its latest software, Apple claims 55% of all Mac users are running on OS X Yosemite while 83% users are running on iOS 8.
Apple made major announcements for its digital assistant Siri this year and claimed that it serves up 1 billion requests a week and is 40% faster and more accurate compared to last year.
Maps is the other Apple service that is getting great new upgrades with iOS 9, with the company claiming that Maps was used 3.5 times more than the next leading maps app with its service getting over 5 billion requests per week.
Apple Pay, the company’s relatively new mobile payments service is now supported by 2,500 banks with there being over 1 million locations where consumers can use the service.
iOS 9 isn’t as major an update as what we’ve seen in the past. Instead, the company is working on ways to make it faster and more powerful. Apple claims iOS 9 offers a 50% reduction in CPU usage while drawing while an iPhone 6 running on iOS 9 lasts for 1 hour extra in a typical usage scenario."

Source:  Stats from WWDC 2015, reported by Next Big What, 9th June 2015

Germany has gone past 'Peak Telephony'

"In 2014, fixed line networks saw 154 billion outgoing minutes in Germany which is 9 billion minutes less than last year. On the mobile side they've been observing an increase of 1 billion minutes. In total that's 8 billion minutes less than the previous year, which is about -3%. The trend has been going on for quite a while now. In 2010, combined fixed and mobile outgoing voice minutes were at 295 billion compared to 265 minutes in 2014. That's 11% less over that time frame."

Source:  Mobile Society, 22nd May 2015

Note - An earlier example of other markets