Survey: Voice-assisted shopping appeals to certain consumers

6/6/2019
Retailers selling products via voice assistants should target users of one particular operating system.

According to results of “The Current State and Future of Voice-Assisted Shopping,” a survey of 1,046 adult U.S. consumers from digital commerce consulting firm Sumo Heavy Industries, 68% of iOS device owners have used a voice assistant, compared to just 45% of Android iOS owners.

Survey data also indicates that consumers tend to use voice assistants seldom or never, or use them frequently. A combined 65% of respondents never (46%) or rarely (19%) use voice assistants. However, another 29% use voice assistants daily (16%) or weekly (13%). Only 6% use voice assistants on a monthly basis.

iOS device owners are also 50% more likely than Android device owners to be daily users of voice assistants (21% vs. 14%).

Looking at what type of device respondents prefer to use for interacting with voice assistant software, almost half (49%) selected smartphones. Options such as smart speakers (18%) and desktop/laptop (15%) distantly trailed. While only about one in five consumers prefers smart speakers, voice-assisted retailers may want to target them – one in three smart speaker owners say they use their voice assistants daily, and more than half (55%) use them at least once a week.

iPhone users are also much more likely to own a smart speaker than Android users. 55% of respondents that own a smart speaker are iPhone owners compared to 28% that are Android users.

Voice assistant technology is still a relatively new, niche market, so it’s not surprising that only 17% of respondents say they have browsed or shopped products using a voice-activated assistant. But diving deeper, the data reveals that 42% of consumers who regularly (weekly or daily) use voice assistants have shopped using the medium.
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