Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:
Siri remains the most popular virtual assistant with 41.4 million monthly active users in the U.S., according to a new report from measurement firm Verto Analytics out this morning, but it has seen a 15 percent decline since last year – or 7.3 million monthly users. In addition, the study found that engagement with Siri has also dropped by nearly half during this period, from 21 percent to 11 percent.
Meanwhile, Amazon Alexa usage has been skyrocketing – jumping 325 percent in monthly active users – that is, from 0.8 million to 2.6 million monthly users, as its user engagement also increased from 10 percent to 22 percent during the same time frame.
Cortana has seen an increase as well, growing from 0.2 million monthly users in the U.S. to 0.7 million, or a 350 percent increase. Its user engagement tripled, from 19 percent to 60 percent.
Siri is about to undergo a sea change, as iOS 11 shifts from human to digitally generated Siri voicing. At the same time, Apple is hard at work building out SiriKit (first introduced with iOS 10) and Siri’s native intelligence. I suspect this year over year drop will be more than made up for over time as Apple starts shipping more enhanced versions of Siri with each new iOS release.
Add to that the benefit that will come when HomePod ships later this year. These are still the beginning times.
Yeah, like when I am in the car.. “Hey Siri” wait wait wait “bing bing”… I start to speak and get interrupted with “Go ahead, I am listening” always consistent and just great fun. Sometimes I don’t wait and just start speaking, it doesn’t matter.
Eh, I have yet to see what the others do exceptionally well. Asking Alexa to buy more toilet paper hardly strikes me as innovative. Or asking the weather, or headlines, etc…
I have home automation linked to my Echo and it is very good at turning on/off my lights, opening blinds and the like.
Sure, but those are all simple tasks. “open the blinds” and commands like that are easy to parse and unambiguous in meaning since the skill is installed. Siri’s good at those too. None of them, though, seem to be much better than the others at things like chaining requests together, understanding much context etc. Cool tech, but still in its infancy.
This report is only worrying to the degree that Siri use is down. The other two being up is mostly due to their initial numbers – .2 million? .8? Those are low starting numbers so any appreciable increase sounds huge in percentage terms.
It’s sad how often I miss the offline voice capabilities pre Siri, but now you need to be online to make the simplest voice commands.
If a couple of my acquaintances are any indication, I expect yesterday’s Prime Day will add a lot of user data to Amazon’s Alexa databases, as an increased number of families begin to use their Echos—both intentionally and otherwise.
A better voice is nice, but in terms of actual functionality and accuracy I doubt we will see a “sea change” in Siri quality. Siri has steadily improved for years and it will continue to do so going forward.
This is a slow-and-steady type of product, not a big bang keynote reveal type of product.