Who Is Buying All The Smart Speakers?

For the Why Axis, we usually look at a single chart that breaks down a tech trend. But occasionally, a report comes along that merits a deeper look. This is the first of several installments in which we'll analyze data from the latest edition of NPR and Edison Research's "Smart Audio Report" about the smart-speaker landscape, a market we're keeping a close eye on here at PCMag.

According to the report, 18 percent of American adults, or around 43 million people, now own a smart speaker. NPR surveyed 909 adult smart-speaker owners ages 18 and older, broken down into two primary groups: first adopters who've owned a smart speaker for a year or more and early mainstream users who've bought a smart speaker in the past year.

Smart-speaker ownership is well distributed across age groups compared with other emerging technologies. For both first adopters and early mainstream users, the most prevalent age range skewed older, with 33 percent of first adopters age 55 and up and the largest 26-percent bracket of early mainstream users between ages 45 and 54.

The report also found that more women own smart speakers than men. Overall, 54 percent of speaker owners surveyed were women, and that jumped to 58 percent for first adopters.

Usage also evolves over time. Compared with their first month of using a smart speaker, 48 percent of first adopters and 54 percent of early mainstream users said they're using it more often, while 33-to-34-percent of both groups are using it less often (the rest of the respondents are using it the same amount).

An increasing number of smart-speaker users own more than one. While about half of both first adopters and early mainstream users still have only one device, more than half of first adopters own multiple devices, and 27 percent own three or more. They're also looking to buy even more: Fifty-eight percent of early mainstream users and 44 percent of early adopters said they plan to purchase another smart speaker for their household.

Check back for tomorrow's edition of The Why Axis for a look at the reasons behind these numbers and the most common requests and tasks in everyday smart-speaker use.

Google Home Max Review