Are Seniors Using Smart Speakers?

Unsurprisingly, seniors are the least likely adults to use any voice technology.

Still, smart speakers are more popular with this cohort than other forms of tech, like wearables. To put that in perspective, just 5.3% of the senior population will use a wearable this year. That's compared with 7.3% of the population who will use a smart speaker.

This week, we looked at smart speaker audiences, including kids and teens, millennials, Gen Xers and baby boomers. To wrap up the smart speaker series, we take a look at seniors.

Will Usage Grow?

By and large, we expect 3.8 million seniors in the US will use a smart speaker. That's a 36.3% increase from 2017, according to our estimates.

This falls in line with other smart speaker usage data. An August 2018 survey from Adobe Digital Insights found that US smartphone users ages 65 and older are less likely to own a smart speaker than their younger cohorts.

Seniors are more likely to have received the speaker as a gift from family, and the holiday promotions of these devices have undoubtedly caused faster adoption among the group. "Amazon has even gone so far as to target this demographic in advertisements, showing how the Echo Dot can help grandchildren keep in touch with their grandparents," said eMarketer forecasting analyst Jaimie Chung.

Smart speakers have real functionality for this demographic, who can use voice technology to make emergency calls. Speakers can also aid seniors with limited mobility in their daily tasks.