Amazon’s Echo voice-controlled speaker can perform more than 3,000 skills today thanks to its Alexa technology, but the most common use case is still simply setting a timer, a recent survey of early adopters found.
You’re not alone: 51 percent of Amazon Echo owners have it in the kitchen
“Alexa, does penne alla vodka really use vodka?”
Amazon
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
And that makes sense when you consider that about half of Amazon Echo owners — 51 percent, to be exact — surveyed place the device in their kitchen. The second most popular location for the smart speaker is the living room, with about one out of three using the device in that gathering space.
The findings come from a survey of about 1,300 smartphone owners who have used voice-controlled virtual assistants from companies like Apple, Google and Amazon. Of that group, 180 respondents — or about 14 percent — said they own an Amazon Echo. The survey was a partnership between Experian and the market research firm Creative Strategies.
“Echo users in our survey are overwhelmingly satisfied with Alexa’s voice recognition, and we found that 39 percent plan to use it more frequently,” Experian’s Cherian Abraham wrote in a blog post. “As Apple cuts away wires and doubles down on Siri, baking it into both accessories (Airpods) and home (Apple TV), we will find ourselves squarely in a voice-first future. I believe voice and messaging will significantly lower technology thresholds that exist around applications and services, increasing both accessibility and usability for consumers.”
In a positive sign for Amazon, 87 percent of Echo owners said they were satisfied with the device. About 85 percent have tried setting an alarm with Echo, and 82 percent have played a song. Two-thirds of responders have also asked Echo for news updates.
What’s not so popular yet? Ordering an Uber. Just 6 percent said they have tried to hail a car by voice.
When it comes to frequency of use, the most common tasks are setting a timer, playing music and controlling lights in the home.
The findings also suggest that Amazon is seeing some traction in turning the Echo into a shopping machine; about one out of three Echo users have asked Alexa to order an item.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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