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Google Home Outships Amazon Echo for Second Quarter in Row

Posted by msmash on from the no-longer-a-dominant dept.

According to the research firm Canalys, Google shipped 5.4 million Google Home speakers in the quarter, compared to 4.1 million for Echo. It's the second quarter in a row that Echo took a backseat to Google. From a report: Things have changed dramatically from the year ago figures. Then, Amazon had an 82% market share of the connected speaker market, to Google's 17%. For the second quarter of this year, Google leads with 32% share and a 449 percent growth, to 24.5% for Amazon. What's behind the turnaround?

Voicebot.ai, a newsletter that tracks the connected speaker market, chalks it up to Google having more languages available in international markets for the Google Home speaker than Amazon does for Echo, so Google is available in more countries. And growth is coming from global. Only 16% of the new volume growth came from the U.S. in Q2 2018, says Canalys.

4 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Google surveillance for all the world!

  2. Bad judgement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So it is not just Americans who lack judgement and put an internet connected spy device in their homes? For no real benefit except the novelty of being able to do simple things with voice commands.

  3. The spy in your home. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    These "connected speaker" systems are like having a spy in your home, one that listens (and can record) all of the time. Sorry, no thanks, not for me. Not that I do anything or say anything to be ashamed of, I am a very private person. Basically these systems are a microphone in your home that is never off. They cannot function if they are not listening all the time. And you never really know whether what they hear is recorded or not, or who may be listening!

    I once wrote a letter to the local paper titled "The Spy In Your Pocket". It was about cell phones and how they can be used to spy on and track their owners. Much of the same applies to these "connected speaker"systems.

    1. Re: The spy in your home. by Albanach · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why do we have these blatant untruths? Sure, these devices listen all the time - for a wake word. The idea that they're always listening to your conversation and always recording are patently false. My network usage confirms this. Unless Google and Amazon are shipping these with LTE modems and are paying for the bandwidth requirements of uploading tens of millions of simultaneous audio streams?