Adoption Rate of Voice Assistants to Rise as Use Cases Proliferate, Says Parks Report

The adoption rate of smart speakers with voice assistants grew from 5 percent of U.S. broadband homes in Q4 2015 to 12 percent in Q4 2016, said a Parks Associates report Tuesday. Some 56 percent of consumers want to use voice-activated personal assistants to control smart home devices, similar to the percentage (55 percent) who want to use them to control entertainment devices, said Parks, which estimates 15.3 million Amazon Echo devices were sold in 2016. Voice interfaces are advancing due to “continued improvements in machine learning and natural language processing,” and their implementation in portable devices, said analyst Dina Abdelrazik. Amazon’s Alexa has taken the “clear lead” in the category since Apple’s Siri launch in 2011, Abdelrazik said. "Adoption for voice assistants will increase as these devices add more and varied capabilities to match the many use cases possible in the smart home and IoT," Abdelrazik said. The Alexa Skills Kit has grown about 40 percent since January 2016, recently topping 10,000 skills, and Amazon plans to release new Alexa devices that also can make phone calls and work as intercoms, she said. Google Home, meanwhile, countered by adding its Google Express delivery network for home shopping. Parks plans a session on voice assistants at its Connections conference in San Francisco May 23-25.