Amazon Alexa vs. Google Assistant | Popularity Test (September 2018)

Jul 23, 2018

Amazon Alexa vs. Google Assistant, who is more popular?

I took for a test the two market-leading assistants - Google Assistant (Google home) and the Amazon Alexa (Amazon Echo).

Both of those companies are pushing their assistants’ very aggressively, In means of new devices where they are available, new features and tools for developers to extend the abilities of their products.


Smart speaker U.S. Installed base market share

Voice assistants are the new search engines

Both of the companies understand that the voice assistant will be eventually the new “search engine”, this explains the huge investment they’re putting into it, as they predict that a bit chunk of our interaction with the internet will be through those assistants, in various devices.

I believe we will see those assistants in our car (Alexa & Google already there), fridge, headphones, and practically every electronic device.

It seems like Google was lagging a bit when Alexa took a huge market share at the beginning but Google is catching up fast lately.


Alexa had a huge jump around Dec 17, Google had theirs later around May 18 (a slightly more moderate jump). As of today, it seems like they are pretty much equal.



Regarding Google actions vs. Alexa Skills, we can see a tight fight, as the trends are changing directions constantly





Products sold

Google shipped 3.2 million Google Home and Home Mini devices in Q1 2018, compared to 2.5 million Echo devices for Amazon. It’s important to know that Echo speaker is $30 cheaper than the Google Home.

conclusions

I believe we will see a tight fight between the two, as a jump in content (better skills/actions) and better A.I. can bring a huge advantage in the future.