Nearly Half of American Households Will Own a Smart Speaker by 2019, Study Says (fortune.com)

Almost half of American households will have a smart speaker by next year, according to a new study from Adobe. From a report: The study, released Monday, finds that 32% of the country already owns a smart speaker and another 16% plan on getting one this holiday season. And just as importantly, people are using those speakers. "Technology trends come and go, but we think voice is here to stay," said Colin Morris, director of product management for Adobe Analytics, in a statement. "Consumers continue to embrace voice as a means to engage their devices and the Internet. It's a trend that has fundamentally changed the face of computing." A notable indicator of the growing popularity of the speakers is how comfortable people are talking to the device in front of others. And that number is on the rise: 72% of smart speaker owners say they use voice assistants in front of others. (Only 29% of people without a smart speaker are comfortable with doing so.) Further reading: Google Home Outships Amazon Echo for Second Quarter in Row.

Comments

Re:Seriously?

[aardvarkjoe]

You have confused average with median.

While pedants love to counter with this, you're wrong. In colloquial English, the word "average" means "typical", not necessarily the arithmetic mean. A few sources (from the first three dictionaries that popped up on google):

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/average
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/average?s=t
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/average

Furthermore, the statement assumes that it makes sense to measure intelligence on a single scale; and by far the most common scale to do that is using IQ. IQ tests are designed to result in a normal distribution, which means that both the median and the mean are the same, and so we expect right about 50% of people to have an IQ less than the mean.

Although the other half of me thinks that if you go out and talk to some people on the street, you'll probably conclude that the majority of people are far dumber than average.