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More Than 8M People Own an Amazon Echo As Customer Awareness Increases 'Dramatically' (geekwire.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the gaining-traction dept.

Amazon continues to see more and more traction with its voice-enabled speaker. An anonymous reader writes: A new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) estimates that there are now 8.2 million customers who own an Amazon Echo device, which first went on sale in late 2014 to Prime members and became generally available in June 2015. That's up 60 percent from the 5.1 million Echo users that CIRP cited in November 2016; the big increase likely resulted from a busy holiday season that saw Echo sales spike 9X from the year prior, according to Amazon. The 8.2 million number is also up nearly 3X from this time last year, CIRP said.

3 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Voice assistants are another fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Alexa, Google Home, Siri, Google Assistant. All of them. There have already been articles out that say usage is dropping after the "new" factor wears off.

    They will go the way of 3D TV within five years.

    1. Re:Voice assistants are another fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I use DuckDuckGo whenever possible, and !bangs when I need to use google. I don't use gmail, nor do I have a google account.

      Go searching for your phone? Mine is in my pocket, or on my nightstand. Again, it's more useless crap to supposedly make things more "convenient", when really it's just convincing you to buy more crap that will end up at the Goodwill in a few years.

  2. Surveillance culture by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Don't these people realize that they are opening up their private lives to companies in wholly new ways?

    Before you say "The FBI can already listen in on your phone anyway", please understand that this is very different:

    - This device has way better microphones, and can listen well across the room.
    - With FBI surveillance, if your phone starts listening in it's a rare occasion that you had no choice in. With Alexa it's assumed and accepted that a microphone is always on, and you conciously accept it.

    - You are conciouslymaking your visitors susceptible to surveillance.
    - It might not store your voice, but they probably store a hashed voice print. This makes you easily recognisable by other Alexa's. It's like Google technically not reading your mail, but finding out lots about you anyway.
    - Visitors of your home will now also get a voice hash.
    - You are implicitly saying you are ok with a culture where companies have these devices in the home. While that may be ok with you, this culture in the end will create social pressure for others to accept this too.
    - It doesn't record everything now to make it more socially acceptible. But it might become a 'feature' later. A beach head like this is asking for feature creep.

    - Check out Hellen Nissenbaum's concept of privacy as 'Contextual Integrity' to better understand how this is, in fact, a sufficiently new situation.
    - Check outthe book "Black Box Society" to better understand how privacy is about the right to avoid social pressure. Or watch this short interview:
    https://www.youtube.com/embed/...

    We all understand the old punitive system where a crime leads to a punishment. It's the one lots of people claim they have nothing to hide from..
    We are now building a much more subtle system next to that in the form of the reputation economy, where deviant behavior is corrected through social pressure.