Smart Speaker Sales Soar as Owners Buy Multiple Devices
More people are buying smart speakers — and one of the reasons the numbers have risen so high recently is that many owners have purchased more than one device.

By Jason Cohen

Business is booming for smart speaker manufacturers. After initial concerns among consumers about devices listening to our every word, sales have rocketed from $900 million in 2016 to $12 billion in 2019. And the industry is projected to be worth $27 billion by 2022.

One major reason behind this incredible rise is our buying habits and how they have changed. The big jump came in 2018, when the percentage of US households with a smart speaker jumped from 12.5 percent to 28 percent. That number increased to 35 percent in 2019 and is estimated to reach 75 percent by 2025.

Now it’s been reported that 60 million Americans aged 18 and older owned at least one smart speaker by the end of 2019. While that’s just a small percentage of the total population, what’s most interesting is the total amount of smart speakers said to have been sold in the past year.

According to a report from NPR and Edison Research, there are 157 million smart speakers in US housholds today. Taken into consideration with the much smaller number of total smart speaker owners, you can conclude that a large swath of buyers are living with more than one device.

The report estimates that most US households contain 2.6 smart speakers, on average, showing that many people have made the tradeoff between privacy and convenience.
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['Technology', 'Smart Speaker', 'Smart Home', 'Gadgets', 'Privacy']