In the recent Q2 earnings call, Amazon Inc. (AMZN) founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced that there are now tens of thousands of developers spread over 150 countries globally who are designing fresh devices employing the Amazon Alexa voice assistant.
Adding to this, the number of Alexa-capable devices has soared more than triple from the previous year. “We want customers to be able to use Alexa wherever they are,” he added.
Going beyond the statistical details, The Information coupled sales volume of Amazon Alexa powered devices with the company’s core business – online shopping. By linking such shopping platform with voice assistants, it’s known as voice shopping.
Voice Shopping on Amazon Alexa
The publication noted that only 2 percent of the owners of Amazon voice assistant supporting devices have made purchases via commanding Alexa to do so for them in 2018. In fact, the e-commerce giant marked that voice shopping architecture is currently not a mass-market service.
Moving further, out of those people who did voice shopping using Alexa, 90 percent of them did not repeat purchase using the same channel. Though, a number of people definitely ask Amazon’s voice assistant about the latest deals on certain products or enquire regarding product tracking information.
Over 50 million Amazon Alexa devices have been sold, but few people actually use the devices for shopping.https://t.co/5RWKp4DFue
— The Information (@theinformation) August 6, 2018
Correspondingly, even the Alexa owners who do shopping through their smart speakers more likely to buy paper towels, laundry detergents or other home supplies, instead of a camera or a book, reported a person knowing internal figures to The Information.
Alexa is the Dominating Voice Assistant
The gadgets powered by Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri are ruling the smart speaker landscape. Most of these voice assistants are used to perform simpler tasks like reminder notes, set alarm, boot on connected Smart home devices, and play music.
During the 2018 second-quarter earnings call, Bezos specifically threw a spotlight on the Amazon Alexa noteworthy hardware sales growth and its enhanced capabilities.
Amazon has reportedly sold 50 million Alexa devices including Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Plus, Echo Spot, Fire TV Stick, and Fire TV Cube sales since launch.
The market is crowded with outside Alexa-enabled devices such as soundbars from Sonos, smart home gadgets like Philips Hue Smart Lighting, headphones from Jabra and many more.
The Amazon voice assistant is even compatible with Windows 10 PCs offered by Lenovo, Acer and HP and infotainments installed in premium cars from BMW, Toyota, and Ford.
The e-commerce giant is also continuously working on improving Alexa spoken language capabilities so that it can learn a new language at a faster rate “through enhancements in Alexa’s machine learning components and the use of semi-supervised learning techniques” documented in a statement.
The Alexa Skills app store now stocks up 45,000 skills build by third-party developers including gaming, entertainment, and hospitality skills.
However, the stats revolving around Alexa voice shopping reveal surprising observations when seen in the light of omnipresence of Alexa-enabled devices in the smart speaker industry.
Amazon attempted to encourage shoppers to try voice shopping during its Prime Day event. The company offered big discounts on products purchased through Alexa devices.
Overall Voice Shopping Market
An Amazon Alexa skill developer, Jo Jaquinta observed that Alexa skills are used more for brand awareness purpose rather than an increasing sales exercise.
Contrary to Amazon voice shopping estimates, the research firm Voicebot.ai found out in a survey of about 1,200 US adults of age 18 or plus, that 26.1 percent of smart speaker owners have recently done voice purchasing. In fact, 16 percent of them told they go for voice shopping on a monthly basis.
Similarly, earlier this year OC&C Strategy Consultants anticipated that sales revenue through voice shopping from all the tech companies could grow from today’s $2 billion to $40 billion by 2022.
2018 Target: Trillion Dollar Figure
Bezos mentioned that the company posted the highest quarterly profits of $2.5 billion than ever in the 2018 Q2. The e-commerce giant is currently sitting with $ 891.33 billion in market capitalization, just a few billions short of the trillion dollar milestone, an honor Apple has already gained.
