Do we still love our smart speakers?

Smart speakers. They’re considered one of the most significant technological developments of our time.

The 2021 Smart Audio Report found one in four Australians owns a smart speaker.

24 percent of smart speaker households have three or more such devices.

Voice assistants have made us more organised. Perhaps smart devices have even made us, well … smarter. But is our love affair with smart speakers beginning to wane?

Abigail Barnes used to love her Amazon Alexa.

But thesedays, it lives in her drawer, and won’t be seeing daylight again anytime soon.

Abigail would ask her device to turn on the lights, set alarms and tell her the time or the weather forecast.

But, in an interview with the BBC, Abigail says she fell out of love with her voice assistant.

“It started giving me random updates or asking me to rate a product I’d bought last month, which I found really irritating.”

She also found the voice commands became unreliable.

“I stopped asking her to turn off the lights when I went to bed, as I’d ask a number of times and then manually turn them off anyway.”

Abigail also became increasingly concerned about privacy.

Recent global studies and industry analysts predicted a boom in the sale of smart speakers.

But while they were flying off the shelves a few years ago, Joseph Teasdale – Head of Tech at research company Enders Analysis – says that’s not the case now.

Teasdale told the BBC that once we buy a smart speaker, we tend not to replace it.

Furthermore, he says smart speakers just aren’t that smart.

“They’re great if you want to set a timer, find out the weather forecast, or listen to the radio. But they’re a long way from an all-purpose artificial intelligence assistant.”

The 2023 Global Smart Speaker Market Report forecast that the market would grow by $16.65 billion during 2022-2027, accelerating at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 18.75%

But the head of UK electrical retailer Currys told the BBC’s Today program that sales of smart speakers have ‘fallen off a cliff,’ as customers cut back to deal with the rising cost of living.

Alex Baldock says that people just aren’t as interested as they used to be.

However, that accounts for a very small sample of sales, according to Amazon.

The retail giant says more than eight million people in the UK use Alexa every day and the number of UK customers interacting with Alexa increased 15% last year.

What part does your smart speaker play in your daily life?