How Now, Smart Speaker?

If you flip back, pre-pandemic, to say 2017, the “smart speaker,” a newish networked audio speaker with some intelligence thrown in was going to be the next great digital doodad.

It wasn’t aimed to be an audiophile speaker, but rather a tool for distributing audio around the house. The selling point: the speaker could hear you and take your commands. Bonus, the “smart” came into play because it was connected to the internet (and a home network, if available), thus providing all sorts of interesting possibilities.

We heard about Alexa and Siri and “Google Assistant” (c’mon, Google marketing people!), the happy interfaces eager to do your bidding, and more, via the receptive smart speaker.

Oh, yeah, Samsung, the consumer home products colossus, was planning a D-Day-style invasion to unify all the home products under its own branded interface. Any day now …

The Jetsons’ future of consumer convenience and luxury was well nigh.

Rosey, make dinner.

Now it’s 2022 and mostly post-pandemic, so how has the smart speaker fared? After all, the height of COVID-19 was a veritable greenhouse for that shiny technofuture; locking everyone into their domiciles with their newly obtained smart speakers and other technofuture goodies. 

Well, have you been hearing a lot about the latest in Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod or Google … whatever they’re calling them? Probably not.

In fact, Sonos and Bose, two actual speaker makers, didn’t waste time and jumped into the market making hi-fi smart speakers that are compatible with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant both. (OK, Google, talk to Marvel, license the name “Jarvis” and have Paul Bettany provide the voice print; you’ll thank me… and give me a dollar for every Jarvis speaker sold and a penny on all iterations of the Jarvis system. I’ll thank you.) 

There wasn’t a revolution. But, possibly better, there has been an evolution; incremental and plodding infiltration of the smart speaker into the home as a crucial foot soldier in the smart home concept. 

The Smart Audio Report, 2022 Edition

This becomes rather obvious in a recent webinar from the dynamic duo of Edison Research and National Public Media (which you know better as National Public Radio/NPR). However, they seem to miss the forest for the trees at times. 

Labeled “The Smart Audio Report” they emphasize “Voice is everywhere” in an undeniable series of interviews and survey results that illustrate smart speaker owners use them as audio players, control tools and information sources. 

The survey section is the most interesting part, in my mind. It has been repeated each year since 2017, providing a wealth of data on the evolution. They even sought out many of the participants from the inaugural survey.

Interestingly, long-term owners admit that after an initial fascination with the cool gadget, it has fallen into the mundane background of everyday life over the years.

A few participants note it does other things, but perhaps since this is an Edison/NPR project, there wasn’t much interest in how the smart speaker controls the coffee maker or interfaces with the doorbell camera.

Their interest is on the audio aspect. So there’s a plug for NPR podcasts. 

In addition, there is data on ease and familiarity with the devices. Oddly, at least to a paranoiac like me, the recent respondents seem to be less worried about government entities listening to them through the smart speaker and feel safer with companies being good trustees of any collected data. 

When smart speakers started to appear in numbers, there was a worry that they would be the final nail in the coffin of the tabletop radio. That concern seems to have fallen by the wayside. 

Overall, for the owners of smart speakers there is an increase in usage 2017–2022, though these are surprisingly small increases. That’s especially noteworthy considering the lockdown in 2020, when people were trapped in their homes, the ideal environment to normalize this activity.

There wasn’t a revolution. But, possibly better, there has been an evolution; incremental and plodding infiltration of the smart speaker into the home as a crucial foot soldier in the smart home concept. 

The smart speaker, in its Amazon/Apple/Google form, was never was going to replace the classic home speaker for those who really care about sound quality — Sonos and Bose are going after that market. AAG, five years later, are still making so-so but functional speakers at low prices.

Remember, much, if not most, of the smart speaker target market grew up on iPods, tinny MP3s and earbuds so “audiophile” sound isn’t their bag, man. It just has to be intelligible. This is amply demonstrated in the webinar by a young mother who calls on Alexa to “Play song ‘I Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You’ by Frankie Valli,” to calm her crying baby. She says it works like a charm. (And she didn’t have to put the baby down, look for the record/CD and set up the CD player, etc.)

The webinar also touches on ads airing across smart speakers and increased usage of voice operated assistants (e.g. Alexa and Siri outside of the smart speaker). There are no ads airing exclusively on smart speakers, yet, but Megan Lazovick, vice president at Edison Research, and Lamar Johnson, vice president for marketing at National Public Media, present engagement data on ads that accompany streamed audio.

Take a listen to the full The Smart Audio Report.

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