While Olivia and Noah may be the most popular names for newborns this year, they both pale in comparison to what has to be the most widely used new name in the country now: Alexa. Voice activation – either free-standing or integrated into existing devices like smartphones – have finally arrived…and arrived big.
Long the stuff of science fiction and the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise, voice-activated controls are still in their infancy but have caught on faster than any other digital tech product in history.
And now they are moving into the world of shopping and are expected to play a major role in holiday purchases this year.
From its modest introduction in November of 2014, Amazon’s Alexa has come to dominate the field with Google’s Assistant and Apple’s Siri trailing.
Their initial functionality was limited to playing music, doing searches and some communications with other people and devices, but more recently they have become ubiquitous for all manner of household chores.
A new report just released says somewhere between one quarter and one third of all American households already own a smart speaker and uses a voice assistant at least once a month.
Globally the total number of smart speakers is expected to double to 225 million units within two years. And while music is still the number one use for voice – 70 to 90 percent of users say they stream music on their devices – shopping represents the next frontier.
RBC Capital Markets forecasts that voice shopping on Alexa alone could generate more than $5 billion per year by 2020. Another researcher, MullenLowe Mediahub, says that this holiday season 40 percent of shoppers ages 35-44 will use voice for holiday shopping. That’s versus 22 percent of the overall population that owns these devices…which is in itself pretty impressive.
A full 60 percent of this demographic says they will use voice to research a product before any potential purchase.
Right now shopping via voice is still very much a niche area of the consumer market but it appears that it will continue to grow. The big change, says one international retailer, will be when the simplicity of paying by voice equals the ease of ordering.
Speaking at a recent conference on shopping trends, Matt Kelleher, Managing Director for Morrisons, a British retailer, said, “When you can pay with voice that will be the tipping point. It’s not going to be next year but it’s going to be pretty soon.”