Amazon, which already holds a dominant position in the US smart speaker market, will continue to dominate U.S. smart speaker market share through 2021, with approximately 70% of total US smart speaker users expected to use an Amazon Echo device, according to eMarketer’s latest estimates.
This year, 69.7% of US smart speaker users will use an Echo, down slightly from 72.9% last year. By comparison, 31.7% of smart speaker users will turn to Google-branded devices, and 18.4% will use other smart speaker brands, including the Apple HomePod, Harmon Kardon Invoke and Sonos One. These percentages add up to more than 100% because some smart speaker users use more than one brand of speaker.
Though Amazon wasn’t first-to-market with a voice assistant, it had first-mover advantage in smart speakers with its US introduction of the Echo and built-in voice assistant Alexa in late 2014. Since then, it has consistently released new features that make the speaker easier and more intuitive to use. It has also opened Alexa to outside development and fostered its compatibility with thousands of Amazon-branded and third-party smart-home devices. The Echo is, however, slightly less competitive in some countries because it supports fewer non-English languages than its major competitors.
MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully, despite Apple’s late start, HomePod can climb out of the “other” category sooner than later. We’d love to see a estimate of U.S. smart speaker revenue share where we suspect HomePod is doing significantly better than in unit share, especially when lumped in with $49 or less units (Amazon’s Echo Dot currently is going for $29).
MacDailyNews Note: As of summer 2019, Amazon’s Alexa supports seven overall languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), and Spanish. Google’s Home currently supports thirteen overall languages: Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, and Swedish. Apple’s Siri voice assistant supports 21 languages: Arabic, Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.