Your Smart Speaker’s Relationship Status: It’s Complicated

Meme marketing is a small segment of digital marketing, but it is having an increasingly outsized impact. Here are the fast facts you need to know.

60% of smart speaker owners interact with their speakers every day, and 33% have conversations multiple times a day. Many kids use the devices, too, often interacting with them as if they were human. Some even see the speakers as friends and engage in lengthy back and forth discussions.

As of December 2019, roughly 30% of US households had a smart speaker. While ownership increases with family income, it is more consistent across generations than most other technologies.

Future smart speaker purchases are hard to project. Almost 50% of consumers say privacy concerns are holding them back. They are worried about everything from their conversations being recorded to personal information being collected for targeted advertising.

Not that anyone is tracking consumers’ smart speaker usage, but reliable data shows that the top activities for smart speakers include getting answers to general questions, accessing weather/traffic/sports/travel updates and streaming music. Only 13% of consumers say finding local businesses is a top use of their speaker, and 10% assert the same about ordering food or services.

Sources: Civic Science 2020, Common Sense 2019, Comscore 2020, Mobile Marketer 2020, Mashable 2019, NPR/Edison Research 2020