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.
The future of voice assistants like Alexa and Siri isn’t just in homes — it’s in cars
Voice assistants are more habit-forming in cars than on smartphones.
Amazon Echo Auto
Rani Molla was a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.
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.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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