More People Use Voice Assistants In Cars Than In Homes, Which Points To Their Future

And that's not people who live in their cars...JL


Rani Molla reports in Re/code:

77 million US adults use voice assistants in their cars at least monthly, compared with 45.7 million using them on smart speakers. Consumers are equally likely to use their smartphone’s voice assistants — Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant — in their cars as they are to use whatever smart assistant came with their car. Smartphones, with their near universal adoption, are the biggest source of regular voice assistant usage

As smart speakers take off in the home, it’s important to note that cars are an even bigger market for voice assistants. Some 77 million US adults use voice assistants in their cars at least monthly, compared with 45.7 million using them on smart speakers, according to a new survey from voice tech publication Voicebot.ai.

There are a few reasons for this:

• Way more people own cars than smart speakers.
• Voice tech in cars has been around since 2004 when IBM launched voice-controlled navigation in Hondas — giving it a decade’s head start over smart speakers (Alexa was released in 2014).
• Cars are arguably one of the best use cases for voice technology, since driving prohibits — or should, at least — people from using touchscreens.

Note that consumers are equally likely to use their smartphone’s voice assistants — Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant — in their cars as they are to use whatever smart assistant came with their car.

Smartphones, with their near universal adoption, are the biggest source of regular voice assistant usage — think Siri on iPhones and Google Assistant on Android phones — with 90.1 million smartphone owners using them at least once a month, according to Voicebot, but car voice tech tends to be stickier.

Of those who’ve used voice assistants in their cars, 68 percent do so monthly. That’s compared with 62 percent monthly usage among smartphone voice assistant users. Smart speakers have the highest rate of voice assistant monthly usership — 79 percent — but that’s not surprising as voice is the only way with which to communicate with speakers.

Amazon and Google — the two biggest names in voice technology — have taken note, with a spate of recent voice assistant offerings for the car. At CES last week, Google Assistant debuted on a couple of car devices meant to bring the voice assistant into automobiles. Amazon released an Alexa-controlled smart speaker for cars back at its annual hardware event in September. Extending its voice assistant to the car is particularly important for Amazon which, unlike Apple and Google, doesn’t have a smartphone.

These solutions help remedy what Sean O’Kane at our sister publication The Verge called the “broken state of in-car infotainment” as car companies are slow or unsuccessful at integrating popular smart assistants into their cars. Carmakers’ own infotainment systems are wanting.

As voice assistants continue to proliferate, look to cars to be a big market.