Providing market intelligence for more than 35 years

In The News

Alexa Leads Way In Ever-Growing Smart Speaker Segment.

Alexa is certainly making herself at home. Growth of voice assistants such as Amazon’s Echo and Google Home have more than doubled over the last year alone. In fact, a new smart home research report from Parks Associates reveals that the adoption rate of smart speakers grew from 5% of U.S. broadband households in Q4 2015 to 12% in Q4 2016.

This is driven in part by continued improvements in machine learning and natural language processing and the prevalence of portable devices, the study says.

In addition, the study shows that a slightly higher percentage of U.S. broadband households (56%) want to use voice-activated personal assistance to control smart home devices compared to those who want to use voice to control entertainment devices (55%). Voice-based personal assistants such as Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana are driving the interest. And estimates show that 15.3 million Amazon Echo devices—Echo, Dot and Tap—were sold in 2016.

From the article "Alexa Leads Way In Ever-Growing Smart Speaker Segment."

Previously In The News

What’s Old Is New Again

While sales of vinyl records have been rising for a while now (Consumers like the sound quality and like the feel of vinyl records.), 2016 was a banner year. Sales hit a 28-year high -- led by David B...

They Started With $10,000. Now They're Taking on ESPN

It's no wonder that OTT is on everyone's mind. In 2016, Major League Baseball's streaming service, MLB.TV, was the fourth-most popular streaming service in the U.S., after Net­flix, Hulu, and Amazon P...

Residential Security: Beyond the Walled Garden

For the independent security dealer, all of these changing customer and technology profiles is already happening. The appeal of the walled garden’s closed system is convenience and usability; however,...

How Apple’s Purchase Of Startup Reveals Health Data Strategy

Harry Wang, senior research director for Parks Associates says that Apple is “known to be searching for the next $100 billion opportunity, and the gigantic healthcare industry is ripe for technology d...