New report shows 56% of U.S. broadband households find it appealing to use voice assistance to control smart home devices

Parks Associates today announced new smart home research showing that the adoption rate of smart speakers with voice assistants grew from 5% of U.S. broadband households in Q4 2015 to 12% in Q4 2016. Voice Assistants and Technologies: Ecosystem and Market Leaders examines the growing market for these smart home devices and the impact of voice control as a major market transformation in both the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI).

“In the past five years, voice control and voice-based technologies have experienced massive growth in the consumer market, igniting the competitive landscape among current and emerging smart home players,” said Dina Abdelrazik, Research Analyst, Parks Associates. “Voice interfaces are advancing due to continued improvements in machine learning and natural language processing, paired with the prevalence of portable devices. Apple increased consumer familiarity of voice control with its introduction of Siri in 2011, but the later-to-market Amazon Alexa has taken a clear lead in this category.”

Parks Associates and other industry leaders will address voice technologies at the 21st-annual CONNECTIONS™: The Premier Connected Home Conference, May 23-25 in San Francisco, California. Abdelrazik will moderate the session “Voice Control: Improving the User Experience” on May 25. The executive conference features keynotes from Comcast, Cox Communications, Intel, and Vivint Smart Home. Registration is open, and media are invited to attend.

Parks Associates shows that a slightly higher percentage of U.S. broadband households (56%) want to use voice-activated personal assistance to control smart home devices compared to those who want to use voice to control entertainment devices (55%). Voice-based personal assistants like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana are driving that interest, and Parks Associates estimates that 15.3 million Amazon Echo devices (i.e., Amazon Echo, Dot, and Tap) were sold in 2016.

“Adoption for voice assistants will increase as these devices add more and varied capabilities to match the many use cases possible in the smart home and IoT,” Abdelrazik said. “The Alexa Skills Kit has grown by roughly 40% since January 2016, recently exceeding 10,000 skills, and Amazon plans to release new Alexa devices that can also make phone calls and work as intercoms. Google Home has countered by adding its Google Express delivery network for home shopping.”

Voice Assistants and Technologies: Ecosystem and Market Leaders examines the growing momentum of voice-based technologies in key industry verticals, driven by the use of connected speaker products, smartphones, and interactive devices. The report examines the ecosystem for voice-based technologies, identifies the market leaders in voice assistants, and assesses the market impact of voice on product and service sectors.

For more information on Parks Associates research or events, visit www.parksassociates.com, or contact sales@parksassociates.com, 972-490-1113. To schedule an interview with an analyst or to request specific research data, please contact Holly Sprague at hsprague@gmail.com or 720-987-6614.

About Parks Associates

Parks Associates, a woman-founded and certified business, is an internationally recognized market research and consulting company specializing in emerging consumer technology products and services. Founded in 1986, Parks Associates provides business intelligence and research services through its proprietary methodologies developed over decades, including quarterly surveys of 10,000 internet households.

The company's expertise crosses many industries: home security and smart home, streaming video, broadband and pay-TV services, digital media and platforms, gaming, Wi-Fi and home networks, connected health, support, consumer electronics, home control systems, energy management, and tech solutions for the multi-dwelling (MDU), small-to-medium business (SMB), and commercial building markets.

Each year, Parks Associates brings thousands of leaders together for its webinars and annual events. The firm hosts the annual executive research and strategy conferences CONNECTIONS™, Connected Health Summit, Smart Energy Summit, Smart Spaces, and Future of Video. https://www.parksassociates.com

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