Voice Control Awareness High Among Amazon Customers as Category Grows, Say Reports

Some 10.7 million U.S. Amazon customers have an Amazon Echo device, said a Consumer Intelligence Research Partners report Monday. Awareness of Echo devices among customers "increased dramatically" in the past 12 months through March 31 but may be reaching a plateau, said analyst Josh Lowitz. Awareness of Amazon Echo reached 86 percent, up from 61 percent in the prior year, said CIRP, and from 20 percent as of March 31, 2105, the first full quarter after Echo's introduction. Primary use cases are as a voice-responsive internet query device, household controller and streaming music speaker, it said. The installed base of Echo devices -- which CIRP counts as the Alexa-enabled Echo, Amazon Tap and Echo Dot -- continues to expand, with 25 percent growth in Q1, said analyst Mike Levin. The Echo Dot ($49) has 52 percent of Amazon's Alexa family installed base, with 36 percent going to Echo and 10 percent to the Tap. Two percent of consumers didn't know which model they owned, it said. The Dot got a push from aggressive discounts during the holiday season, said Levin. The study was based on surveys of 500 U.S. consumers who made a purchase at Amazon from January to March, it said. Meanwhile, just over 10 percent of U.S. broadband households have adopted a smart speaker with a voice assistant such as Amazon Alexa or Google Home, said a Parks Associates report Monday. Parks predicts the category will ship more than 50 million units by 2020. Voice-based technologies are growing as a preferred consumer interface, said analyst Dina Abdelrazik, with Samsung soon to add Bixby to a field including Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft's Cortana (see related story, this issue). "Voice is now vying to be the default method for consumer interaction with all connected products,” she said.