In the first quarter of 2018, analyst company Canalys reported that Google beat Amazon to first place in smart speaker by selling 3.1 million Home devices as compared to 2.5 million Amazon Echo. In another setback, a report has claimed that nearly two percent of the people with devices that use Amazon’s Alexa AI assistant, which is mostly Echo speakers, have made a purchase with their voices so far in 2018.
According to The Information, Amazon have sold 50 million Alexa-capable devices since its launch hoping that the users would use the devices to shop online but the company’s hopes were shattered when the executives learnt that there were few takers of this concept.
The news website says that two persons briefed on the company’s internal figures. “Of the people who did buy something using Alexa voice shopping, about 90 percent didn’t try it again,” one of the persons was quoted as saying. “A larger number, 20 percent, have engaged more broadly with Alexa voice shopping by using commands like ‘What are my deals?’ and ‘Where is my stuff?’ to track orders that were likely made on other devices,” The Information reported.
Another research firm Voicebot.ai in June said that nearly 16 percent of smart speaker owners use them to shop at least once a month. The Information claims that a majority of people use Alexa and other smart speaker devices like the Google Home to do things like checking the weather, operating connected smart devices, and streaming media.
Meanwhile, an Amazon spokesperson told the website that millions of customers use Alexa to shop because it is the most convenient way “to capture needs in the moment.” “We want to enable customers to shop in whatever way is easiest for them,” the spokesperson said. But according to the persons who briefed on the company’s internal figures, “Clearly, voice shopping is not yet in the stage of being a mass market product."
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