Smart speaker satisfaction at 89 percent, HomePod adoption hits 3 percent, survey finds
A new survey from Gene Munster's Loup Ventures found 89 percent of smart speaker owners are satisfied with their device, but despite coming packed with virtual assistant technology, most use the to play music or check the weather.
Of the 520 U.S. consumers polled as part of the survey, 31 percent of respondents said they owned a smart speaker, whether it be an Amazon Echo product, Google Home, Apple HomePod or other device with AI capabilities.
Further extrapolation found 55 percent owned an Amazon Echo device compared to 23 percent for Google Home and 3 percent for HomePod. Surprisingly, 15 percent of respondents said they use a product powered by Microsoft's Cortana, a virtual assistant that has not enjoyed wide adoption by speaker OEMs.
According to Munster, with penetration at about one-third of the U.S. population, the results roughly resemble the current market landscape, save for a "slight" overrepresentation of Cortana owners and underrepresentation for Echo.
Perhaps more important is customer satisfaction, which floated to a lofty 89 percent, excellent for a new device category. Breaking it down, the survey found 59 percent of respondents were "satisfied" with their smart speaker, while 30 percent were "very satisfied."
For Munster, the high satisfaction rates correspond to relatively low expectations. As evidenced in survey results, a majority of users demand very little from their smart device. The top three use cases are, in order, playing music, checking the weather and asking general questions.
Less than 15 percent of users say they access other functions like checking sports scores, placing calls or texts, and controlling smart home accessories. Navigation and purchases fall even lower on the chart at around 5 percent.
"The top use cases for smart speakers today make sense because they are well defined and they work consistently," Munster writes. "This works really well for simple google-able' questions or fetching info from a weather app, but as the use cases broaden, it is not always clear where to send a query."
Use cases are expected to multiply as companies like Apple and Amazon work to broaden their respective AI voice assistants. Current device iterations are merely a stepping off point to a more comprehensive ecosystem in which multiple devices and services are connected and controlled by a user's voice.
If and when voice controlled hardware takes over, it will represent a paradigm shift from current UI applications dominated by touchscreens.
Apple is well on its way to lead such a revolution with HomePod. The smart speaker boasts an array of beamforming microphones and adaptive audio technology to better detect and respond to user voice commands, while onboard components offer access to Apple's various connected platforms like iCloud, Apple Music and HomeKit. As AppleInsider noted in its review, all that is missing is a smarter Siri.
Of the 520 U.S. consumers polled as part of the survey, 31 percent of respondents said they owned a smart speaker, whether it be an Amazon Echo product, Google Home, Apple HomePod or other device with AI capabilities.
Further extrapolation found 55 percent owned an Amazon Echo device compared to 23 percent for Google Home and 3 percent for HomePod. Surprisingly, 15 percent of respondents said they use a product powered by Microsoft's Cortana, a virtual assistant that has not enjoyed wide adoption by speaker OEMs.
According to Munster, with penetration at about one-third of the U.S. population, the results roughly resemble the current market landscape, save for a "slight" overrepresentation of Cortana owners and underrepresentation for Echo.
Perhaps more important is customer satisfaction, which floated to a lofty 89 percent, excellent for a new device category. Breaking it down, the survey found 59 percent of respondents were "satisfied" with their smart speaker, while 30 percent were "very satisfied."
For Munster, the high satisfaction rates correspond to relatively low expectations. As evidenced in survey results, a majority of users demand very little from their smart device. The top three use cases are, in order, playing music, checking the weather and asking general questions.
Less than 15 percent of users say they access other functions like checking sports scores, placing calls or texts, and controlling smart home accessories. Navigation and purchases fall even lower on the chart at around 5 percent.
"The top use cases for smart speakers today make sense because they are well defined and they work consistently," Munster writes. "This works really well for simple google-able' questions or fetching info from a weather app, but as the use cases broaden, it is not always clear where to send a query."
Use cases are expected to multiply as companies like Apple and Amazon work to broaden their respective AI voice assistants. Current device iterations are merely a stepping off point to a more comprehensive ecosystem in which multiple devices and services are connected and controlled by a user's voice.
If and when voice controlled hardware takes over, it will represent a paradigm shift from current UI applications dominated by touchscreens.
Apple is well on its way to lead such a revolution with HomePod. The smart speaker boasts an array of beamforming microphones and adaptive audio technology to better detect and respond to user voice commands, while onboard components offer access to Apple's various connected platforms like iCloud, Apple Music and HomeKit. As AppleInsider noted in its review, all that is missing is a smarter Siri.
Comments
The MSM was feeding us pro Amazon horse crap.
Apple got their entry to the market right, and they’ll only get better in the future.
What are the conjoint use? If there are a lot, and they'd have to be, most of those speakers would be used for barely anything seemingly!
Intensity of use is a better gauge. Intensity of use of one of the biggest distinction between Android users and IOS users, for a long while Android users barely used their browsers. With mid level phones being less horrible, this has had an uptic, yet they still use it a lot less than IOS users.
It's also pretty surprising that 60% of people with a speaker, a speaker for music... Don't use it as a speaker unless of course the sound is is so crappy you can't use it for that... hmm.. and then it makes perfect sense for the lower tier things. If you only spent $50 for parlor tricks, then I guess you would think it meets basic expectation for that price (probably would not be if you'd spent $300 for just that).
Notice there is barely a thing in there for the ubiquitous on tech sites of crappy speaker being used to drive a big ass stereo through home automation, something we hear those things are used all the time on Mac Rumors...
BTW, this comes from Loup, the same idiotic firm with the clickbait AI is a failure with a search list "study" from two weeks ago. So, everything coming out of them is pretty close to garbage.
All three hit the bullseye, but Apple hit the same bullseye while doing much less.
Or is it doing much less? The competition is certainly more capable, but apparently, the only people who are interested in these extras are pundits and geeks.
Apple has a wealth of data on what their customers want from Siri. They released the HomePod based on this data, not on what folk around here are screaming for. In the future this will change, but they decided that delaying the release for stuff only geeks care about wasn’t smart.
The multi-user thing is a head scratcher for me though.
But that's why there's a dozen different smart-speakers already to choose from across several price points, with varying features from water-resistance to battery-powered portability to video-enabled, front-firing to 360 sound to stereo pairs, multi-room and even multi-user, and you don't need to spend $300+ to get one that sounds good to you.
You can opt for premium sound PLUS a very capable voice assistant and home control hub and still stay under $200, a very good voice-assistant first with decent sound capabilities and spend half that, $100 or even less, or a great-sounding speaker with proven pedigree you can connect now to your $50 voice assistant and move to another assistant device when a new one tickles your fancy next year or beyond (perhaps the smarter money move), and all things in-between.
Over the next few months you'll have another dozen or more to choose from besides those already on the market including B&O, Pioneer, Altec-Lansing, Bose and other respected speaker brands with a long history of great-sounding gear but now with on-board voice assistants for music control and smart-home devices. With Apple testing the waters now it can only help speed the move to voice control and input instead of tippy-taps on your keyboard. When Apple users who've resisted Amazon and Google speakers (some of which sound darn good in their own right) discover just how useful a voice assistant on the counter-top can be despite their stated doubts about it they'll push for far more capabilities than the first-gen HomePod is offering, and that's a great thing for the rest of the industry. Rising tides...
The move is towards voice assistance and Apple knows that, and it's not just smart-speakers. While there's already a few voice-assistant earbuds/headphones available look for a big interest in those too by year's end. Several companies have already indicated their intent to integrate "Hey Google" or "Alexa" into their headsets besides those that have already begun doing so and Apple will join the club themselves sooner rather than later with "Hey Siri" on Airpods. Bet on it.
Or ... the move could be towards higher quality audio. I'm sure all the Apple copycats are hard at work sawing HomePods in half in their R&D areas.
Quotes like that are awesome though thanks, I filed it away to look at in ten years. I love reading the ones from the iPhone's early days too, not to mention Apple Watch.
Thats all? Should be easy to make Siri smarter! I mean, look at how much she’s advanced compared to other voice assistants since she was released...
Apple isn’t close to leading anything when it comes to voice despite what puff pieces like this one say. They are woefully behind. Amazon, Google and others are far more likely to upgrade their hardware to match or exceed HomePod than Apple is to suddenly make Siri smarter.
Voice UI is definitely the future, but Apple has a long way to go. The situation isn’t as dire as when Microsoft largely ignored mobile and completely missed the leap to smartphones and touch screens, but it’s similar. Microsoft had a mobile offering, but it was weak and uninspired and then along came the iPhone and blew everything out of the water. Unless Apple can radically and rapidly improve Siri, Google and/or Amazon will likely own the voice space, not Apple.
HomePod makes me believe that Apple is capable of engineering a great little speaker, and that is all. Nothing about Siri on HomePod suggests that Apple is anywhere close to having a market leading voice assistant. Apple had a giant head start in the voice assistant space and completely squandered its lead.