Report: In Five Years 50 Percent Of US Homes Will Have Voice Assistants

If you don’t own a smart speaker now, chances are you will soon enough. According to a new report from Juniper Research, devices like the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Sonos One will be installed in a majority of U.S. households within the next five years.

According to news from TechCrunch, the report reveals that 55 percent of U.S. households will have a voice-enabled smart device by the year 2022. That means over 70 million households will have at least one of these speakers in their home, and the total number of installed devices will likely top 175 million.

What’s most interesting about the report, though, is that the majority of voice assistant usage won’t be through these in-home devices. Instead, it will occur on smartphones, with over 5 billion assistants expected to be installed on smartphones worldwide by 2022.

Voice controls are also expanding across other platforms, including PCs, tablets, connected TVs, cars and wearables. Combined with smartphones and smart speakers, the report forecasts the total number of voice assistant devices will reach 870 million in the U.S. by 2022 – a 95 percent increase from the 450 million estimated for 2017.

And while most of today’s voice assistants are provided to users for free, Juniper sees advertising as the biggest revenue opportunity, reaching $19 billion globally by 2022. The report notes that only some voice queries will be product searches, which means advertisers will have to “build a brand’s voice strategy around information provision as well as sales,” explained the author of the research, James Moar.