Siri losing ground to competing voice assistance software
Apple popularized voice assistance on smartphones with the introduction of Siri on the iPhone 4s back in late 2011. Since then, the number of competitors have grown to include Microsoft Cortana, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Samsung S Voice to name a few. While the market for virtual personal assistance has grown over the years, these newer alternatives to Siri have been slowly biting off market share from Apple.
The data comes courtesy of US analytics firm Verto Analytics. Accordingly, unique Siri users in the United States have dropped from 48.7 million to 41.4 million YoY when looking at the period between May 2016 to May 2017 to represent a decrease of 15 percent. The second most popular voice assistant tool continues to be S Voice, but even Samsung has lost some users from 24.8 million to 23.2 million during the same time frame. Meanwhile, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Cortana have all gained new users with a wider net reach each.
Despite the slow creep from competitors, both Apple and Samsung still dominate the market with a combined 30 percent net reach to all US consumers who utilize voice assistant tools. Google's Text-to-Speech, which already comes pre-installed on most Android devices, is third in terms of net reach at 9.18 percent.
Other interesting bits from the data below show that most consumers who utilize voice assistance only do so less than 10 times per month. The outlier here is Cortana where the average number of sessions jumped from 14 in May 2016 to 177 in May 2017.
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