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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.

32 of 48 comments (clear)

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

    Google surveillance for all the world!

    1. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      an the people is happy about that. Silly. Google is evil.

    2. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      We have proof, folks prefer google over amazon tracking their every word.

    3. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      So at least 9.5 million more idiots this quarter. Yays I can maths.

    4. Re:Great! by johnsie · · Score: 1

      You sound like Lolly, that paranoid woman out of Orange is the New Black. Always ranting and raving how the NSA is chasing after her.

  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. Google is the better product by JoeyRox · · Score: 3

    I started out with the Echos and now use both Minis and Echo's. Alexa currently integrates into more third-party skills, owing to its head start in the market, but Google whips it when it comes to natural language recognition, syntax and context matching, and back-end logic.

    1. Re:Google is the better product by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      But Google's natural language responses are irritating. Like a middle aged person trying to speak like a millennial - and I say this as a middle aged gen X.

    2. Re:Google is the better product by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Also Google has a track record of securing their voice input. They are more transparent too - you can listen to everything it's ever listened to by logging in to your account.

      Their devices have a button that can activate them so they don't have to be listening all the time either.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    3. Re:Google is the better product by SlaveToTheGrind · · Score: 2

      They are more transparent too - you can listen to everything it's ever listened to by logging in to your account.

      Sorry, is it supposed to make me feel better that Google has permanently archived everything it's ever listened to in my house?

    4. Re:Google is the better product by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      Not saying I want one, but it's better than having no access to that data.

      Or turn voice history off and use the button for maximum privacy.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    5. Re:Google is the better product by azcoyote · · Score: 1

      I really want to try out an Amazon device. I have a third-party Google Home and it is pretty disappointing. Google refuses to update the firmware, so it doesn't do broadcast and several other things. I can't use it to take notes (other than useless grocery lists), schedule appointments, send texts, etc. I would hope that Amazon's third-party integration would give it more useful features. Right now my Google Home is mostly a glorified music player.

      And worst of all, I can only play my songs by uploading every single one to Google Play Music. In doing so, it takes forever but doesn't actually upload the songs, but simply replaces them with their own versions of the same song--which sometimes are not quite right. Then I have to re-upload all of the same songs under my wife's account so that it will let her play music. Then I try to do the same for my daughter, and find out that you can only do it twice from the same PC. And then half the time my wife asks it to play toddler music, and it starts playing gangster rap or some such.

      --
      Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
    6. Re:Google is the better product by JoeyRox · · Score: 1

      Understood but its not Google's fault that the device doesn't get new firmware - that's the fault of device maker. I explicitly avoid non-Google home devices for this very reason.

    7. Re:Google is the better product by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 1

      I bought Google Mini to test and immediately ordered replacements for Echo. It is just so much better at usability and responses that it's kind of embarrassing for the Echo. I only use echo now for adding things to my Prime shopping list.

  4. More shipped because of Walmart by renegade600 · · Score: 3

    The biggest reason for the higher shipments is because the google home is sold through Walmart. Every Walmart store I have been in has a large supply of them on display. Makes it easier to buy on impulse.

    The closest place for me to get an echo is about an hour away. I guess Amazon do not want to sell their devices through their major competitor. You cannot even get the echo on Walmarts website.

    1. Re:More shipped because of Walmart by CptLoRes · · Score: 3

      Did you read the article? Only 16% of the 449% Goggle Home sales growth, came from the US. The main problem with Amazon Echo, is that when I go to Amazon and try to order one, it simply says "This item does not ship to ". Simply because I do not live in a English speaking country. Never mind if I wanted a English speaking Echo or not.

    2. Re:More shipped because of Walmart by renegade600 · · Score: 1

      Walmart is in 28 countries, not just the US.

    3. Re:More shipped because of Walmart by quarrel · · Score: 1

      So? He's still correct.

      This isn't because of Walmart.

  5. Why not just use a phone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Google Home is basically just an interface for Google's search which supports voice input. And Android can even receive commands to open apps and such. The same features could be added to a TV player/Chromecast-like device, so a dedicated speaker isn't necessary. It would even be an improvement since visual apps could be controlled.

    Amazon and Apple's own smart speakers are the same, but they don't have quite as robust search portal as Google. It makes slightly more sense why Amazon would need one, though, since Siri is accessible via iPhones.

    1. Re:Why not just use a phone? by renegade600 · · Score: 1

      the phone does not have the microphones as the home and echo does so it is tough to use across the room. You are right, the biggest problem with Amazon Echos is their search BUT since google owns their own search it is easier for them to set things up for their device to find things easier and better.

  6. 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 renegade600 · · Score: 2

      what's another spy :-) homes these days have so many different devices that can spy on you there is no way around it.

    2. 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?

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

      No, don't start trying to school me on network monitoring. I get that the device can't know it's being monitored if you do it right. But what it could do is send captured voice traffic at a later time, or during a period of time when you know it's supposed to be sending traffic. You know, unless your super sleuth skills allow you to decrypt what it sends and all.

      What it cannot do is send voice without using data. And voice data, even compressed, is pretty large. More than enough to be noticeable. In a home with music, kids and pets, daytime noise is almost constant. The actual volume of data would be huge if it was transferring everything it heard. And there's no way it's powerful enough to filter out background and only transmit relevant communications.

      A 48kbps audio stream over a month would take about 15GB. It's easy to see if a device transmits even a hundredth of that. Place a Google Home next to a TV playing CNN 24/7 and it doesn't suddenly start transmitting 15GB per month.

      As I said in my original post, it is easy to confirm that a Google Home or an Amazon Echo does not record/transmit everything it hears unless it's broken.

    4. Re: The spy in your home. by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 1

      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.

      ...until you become a "person of interest" in which case they remotely switch the microphone on all the time.

      --
      Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
    5. Re:The spy in your home. by dunkelfalke · · Score: 1

      Apparently not private enough.
      Me ordering Alexa is the only talking done in my house.

      --
      "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
  7. Suckers Quantified by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    That comes to 9.5 million per quarter. A quarter of 365/4 = 91.25 days = 131400 minutes, results in 9.5e6/131400 = 72.3 per minute. This finally provides some hard evidence to conclusively disprove the old hypothesis that only one sucker is born each minute. Real world data clearly indicates that this superstition was nearly two orders of magnitude off.

  8. So what? by devslash0 · · Score: 1

    Neither will ever be allowed inside my house for privacy reasons.

  9. Ogle Home vs Always-on Lecho by epine · · Score: 2

    Closet exhibitionists, rejoice!

    I mean, you always could arrange a dozen sheet music stands around the old four-poster, and use that to display a panoply of two dozen interrelated positions (in the Kama Sutra Unbound all leaves are perforated)—but the net effect was a bit intimidating.

    Some technologies really do improve on the old state of the art.

  10. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  11. How do you do, fellow kids? by Blaede · · Score: 1

    How about we listen to a music band while we operate our skate contraptions?

  12. imagine... by hrm · · Score: 1

    ... a Beowulf cluster of those!

    Oh wait, wrong century.. Sorry.