It seems like not many voice assistant owners use those devices in order to shop, which is probably something that voice assistant device manufacturers will want to change, especially Amazon. According to The Information, only around 2-percent of consumers who own Alexa-powered devices have bought something using their voice this year. Now, if consider that Amazon sold around 50 million Alexa device in that time period, it puts things into perspective, and it makes it quite likely Amazon will want to change that moving forward.
That’s not all though, out of those 2-percent of people who actually bought something using their voice, 90-percent of them did not try again. That being said, around 20-percent of consumers did engage with Alexa voice shopping using commands like ‘Where is my stuff?’ in order to track their purchases. According to the provided info, consumers use Google Home and Alexa-powered devices mostly to answer simple questions, and for simple commands, like ‘What’s the weather like?’, ‘Will it rain today?’, ‘Play music’… and so on. The Information also says that most people who use their smart speakers for shopping tend to shop for paper towels, detergents, and other home staples, while some ‘more complicated’ purchases are always done the old fashion way, as people want to read reviews, check out prices on various sites, and generally get a better idea about a product they’re about to purchase.
Now, the provided info actually differs from earlier reports, as many studies claim that more people use voice assistant for shopping. A June survey (by Voicebot.ai) claims that out of 1,200 US adults who are at least 18 years old, and own a smart speaker, 26.1-percent of them have used it to make purchases online. So, as you can see, that’s quite a different report right there, and it’s kind of hard to know what to believe at this point. One thing is for sure, though, companies behind smart speakers and other voice assistant-powered devices will probably want to change this trend and get consumers to make considerably more purchases via smart speakers, and the best way to do that is to make smart speakers more capable in that regard.