Smart speakers have been around for a few years now, and we have to give Amazon credit for kind of kicking it off. While digital assistants aren’t new, Amazon made a very smart move early on by opening up Alexa to third-party developers, thus allowing them to flood the market with smart speakers.
As a result, it’s not surprising that Amazon is currently dominating the smart speaker market where according to the figures from eMarketer, Amazon currently owns 69.7% of the smart speaker market. It’s such a massive lead and in second place is Google, who currently controls 31.7% of the market, while “others” (which presumably includes the likes of Apple) is at 18.4%.
Like we said, Amazon’s strategy with Alexa early on definitely helped them gain control of the market, plus with affordable devices like the Echo Dot, it allowed them to capture a lot of market share very early on. eMarketer predicts that come 2021, Amazon’s market share will dip ever so slightly to 68.2%, but even then, it still places them well ahead of the competition.
That being said, there are rumors suggesting that Apple could have a cheaper HomePod in the works. Whether or not that will do them any favors remains to be seen as the current HomePod doesn’t seem to have done all that well.
Filed in . Read more about Alexa, Amazon, Connected Objects, Google, Google Assistant, IoT (Internet of Things) and Speakers. Source: macrumors