Chances are, you’ve talked to your phone in the past week.
Or even just this morning when you asked it for directions or to check traffic.
Maybe you asked Alexa for news or weather updates.
You weren’t talking to another person, though. You were talking directly to your phone, smartwatch or smart-home device, and it responded.
We don’t really think about it, but voice recognition is the way that technology is going. And why not? It’s faster and more convenient than typing, and generally you’ll get better results than if you used a “normal” search engine.
It’s not just a fad. Stats show that voice recognition is here to stay.
In fact, 65% of people who own an Amazon Echo or Google Home can’t imagine going back to life before they had one.
And this past January, it was reported that there are now over 1 billion voice searches per month.
One more stat: 72% of people who own a voice-activated speaker say their devices are used as a part of their daily routine.
It’s not often that people adjust their lives for one product, so this trend more than likely has some fuel behind it.
So, voice recognition technology is clearly already having an impact on how we live. And the chart below takes that one step further by showing how much it can still grow.
There were an estimated 20 million Amazon Echo units sold last year, and that could easily grow by 50% or more this year.
But Google is making an impact on the industry as well. In the first quarter of 2018, it outsold the Echo for the first time with its Google Home product. Overall, 3.2 million Google Homes were sold.
And increased competition means that both companies are going to keep trying to outdo one another, making the products better and more convenient for everyone.
This market right now is dominated by Amazon Echo and Google Home devices. Those two products currently make up about 94% of the smart speaker market share.
So, buying the stocks of these companies, Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOGL), would be the two most obvious ways to invest in the growth of the industry.
But further down the road, there will likely be more companies that play into the growth of this relatively new industry.
Regards,
Ian Dyer
Internal Analyst, Banyan Hill Publishing