“Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and OK Google are all hot names in tech right now. Digital assistants powered by artificial intelligence are the next big thing for Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google. Consumers however, might not be as excited. We set out to understand more about how consumers are using these agents as well as how they feel about them,” Carolina Milanesi blogs for Creative Strategies.
Creative Strategies ran a study in the U.S.A. that focused on 500 mainstream consumers and their use of smartphone-based voice assistants.
“21% of our panel have never used Siri, 34% have never used OK Google and 72% have never used Cortana,” Milanesi writes. “When we look within each ecosystem, the numbers get better: only 2% of iPhone owners have never used Siri and only 4% of Android owners have never used OK Google. The majority of active users within their distinct ecosystems admit to use these features only rarely or sometimes: 70% for Siri and 62% for OK Google. (Unfortunately, we did not have a statistically significant number of Windows Phone users in our panel).”
MacDailyNews Take: Ha! Microsoft is, as always, a joke.
“39% of these consumers use voice assistants in the home, 51% in the car, 1.3% at work and 6% in public,” Milanesi writes. “Interestingly, iPhone owners’ usage in the car is even higher than average at 62% and Android is lower at 37%, which is somewhat surprising given the high attach rate of Google Maps in Android… 20% of consumers who said they never used a voice assistant stated they had not done so because they feel uncomfortable talking to their technology, especially in public. With public usage as low as 3% for iPhone users, it seems users are still uncomfortable talking to their devices.”
“Even more fascinating is this happens in the US where consumers are accustomed to talking loudly on phones in public. The US is the land of iDEN, the technology that, for many years, allowed consumers to use their phones like a walkie-talkie,” Milanesi writes. “A very similar technology called Push-to-Talk never took off in Europe, mainly because consumers felt it was not socially acceptable to have your conversation heard by people in your vicinity. In Asia, most people still cover their mouth when talking on the phone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We see plenty of uncouth fragmandroid settlers screaming into their poor man’s iPhones in public, so perhaps Milanesi is correct in positing that “Android users show the highest usage of voice assistant in public with 12%, possibly because more Android users are likely to have experienced iDEN-based mobile phones in the past than iPhone users.”
SEE ALSO:
Apple Watch etiquette (or how not to be a rude jerk) – April 13, 2015
Apple’s Siri intelligent personal assistant raises new issues of iPhone etiquette – December 2, 2011
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Tom R.” for the heads up.]