Amazon’s Alexa To Dominate Voice-Activated Personal Assistant Market

Amazon and its voice-activated assistant, Alexa, is dominating the burgeoning digital personal assistant market, with research firm eMarketer predicting it will command 70.6 percent of the market share this year.

In the research report, eMarketer said in 2017 35.6 million consumers in the U.S. will use a voice-activated assistant device including Alexa via Amazon’s Amazon Echo speaker and Google’s Google Home at least once a month. That represents a 128.9 percent increase in usage from 2016.

“While still far from mass adoption, virtual assistants are becoming more widely used by Americans,” eMarketer wrote in a research report.

Google Home will be a distant second in terms of usage in 2017, with only 23.8 percent market share, eMarketer found. The rest of the voice-activated device market will be split between Lenovo, LG, Harman Kardon and Mattel. The research firm does expect Amazon’s market share to decline slightly over the next few years as Google’s presence in the market increases. Still, Amazon will maintain its dominant lead in the market for some time.

“Consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with the technology, which is driving engagement,” said Martín Utreras, vice president of forecasting at eMarketer, in the report. “As prices decrease and functionality increases, consumers are finding more reasons to adopt these devices.”

eMarketer noted that virtual assistants that are embedded in all sorts of devices are expected to see growth in 2017 as well. The category which includes Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Now is expected to see an uptick of 23.1 percent year over year in 2017.  eMarketer predicts 60.5 million consumers in the U.S. will use Siri, Cortana or another virtual assistant at least once per month, equating to 27.5 percent of smartphone users or close to one-fifth of the population.