9 out of 10 consumers use a voice assistant on their smartphone; 41% also said they use this feature on a daily basis

According to a recent survey and report by reputation management and local SEO provider Chatmeter, nine out of ten smartphone users have a habit of using virtual assistants.

Four adults will check the local information

The survey also found that about 40% of consumers “use voice search to find directions, addresses or business hours”, while 27% said that “the main use of voice systems is to find restaurants, shops or companies”.

It’s common to search for local information on mobile devices. In the case of Google’s conference call yesterday, CEO Sundar Pichai said, “Local mobile search is growing faster than overall mobile search, with nearly 50% growth last year alone.”

After the local voice search, the driving route is reached

After using the voice search of their smartphones to check local information, about nine out of ten (88%) users said that they “usually use the function of driving directions”. This is in line with the idea that mobile search meets real-time needs and “proximity”.

The report generally ignores the distinction between using smartphones and smart speakers for voice search. However, it clearly states that “61 consumers own a smart speaker – 51% of them use it every day and 29% use it at least once a week.” If we take 250 million adults as the base, it means that 152 million people in the United States now own smart speakers. This number is significantly higher than other estimates and is therefore unreliable.

A recent large survey by Kantar TNS found that about 21% of U.S. households have at least one smart speaker. There are about 117 million households in the United States, which means that the number of smart speakers is about 25 million (assuming only one per household). However, many families have more than one.

All in all, the popularity of smart speakers is somewhere between the results of Kantar and Chatmeter surveys.

Impact on market participants

When it comes to user behavior, we need to distinguish between smart speakers and smartphones. There is still room for smart speakers to generate a lot of searches. Of course, consumer behavior will change over time, and smart speakers will eventually bring more new discoveries and business opportunities.

In contrast, smartphones are still the main means by which the masses browse the Internet. As voice-based mobile search and single answers (from Google Assistant) become more mainstream, market players need to optimize snippets (summaries) to respond to conversational queries with more organized data and richer content.