YouGov poll: UK smart speaker ownership has doubled in six months

It may well seem like you can’t move without knocking over an Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant smart speaker at the moment, and that’s because the market adoption is moving at a staggering rate, if a new YouGov poll is to be believed.

We already knew that millions of Amazon’s speakers have made their way into our homes, with a January 2018 poll indicating that one in six Americans now owns a smart speaker. This time it’s the UK’s turn, with a poll that shows adoption of smart speakers has doubled over a period of six months.

Apparently it’s gone from a nation where 5% of all homes had a smart speaker in Q3 of 2017, to 10% in Q1 of 2018. One in ten is still quite a bit behind the Americans, but it just goes to show the rising popularity of these devices.

Another interesting note is that Amazon’s popularity is apparently slipping slightly, with its overall percentage of smart speakers dropping from a vast 88% of the whole market, down to 75%.

That’s still three quarters of the market owned by a single company, but it shows that it’s certainly not the only horse in the race. Google Assistant speakers and Apple’s HomePod are now giving Amazon’s Echo range a run for its money, as well as the plethora of other, third-party speakers.

Now, as always with polls, these findings are taken from a group of people (in this case a little over 2,000) and extrapolating the numbers, so it’s possible that ownership could actually be less, or more, but it’s still interesting to see this emerging technology really start to actually emerge.