AI’s spending surge is moving from ambition to accountability. Rising AI costs, agentic commerce, Apple’s assistant strategy, and consumer trust issues are changing the marketing landscape.

Delays in core features could stall everything from Vision Pro to smart home devices, just as rivals double down on smarter assistants.

Despite economic headwinds slowing growth, most smart home IoT device categories continue to gain users looking for increased capabilities.

The US audience for voice assistants is nearing a milestone: 150 million users. Read on for figures from our latest forecast, including how many people are using smart speakers and how they use them.

This report explores our latest forecasts for US voice assistant, smartphone voice assistant, and smart speaker users, and provides additional analysis about trends shaping the market.

Amazon, which already holds a dominant position in the US smart speaker market, will continue to maintain this leadership through 2021, with approximately 70% of total US smart speaker users expected to use an Amazon Echo device, according to our latest estimates.

This report features our latest forecasts for US voice assistant users, including those who use voice assistants on smartphones and smart speakers. It also provides an analysis of the trends shaping the market.

This report includes our forecast for smart speaker users in Canada, China, France, Germany, the UK and the US, along with a focus on adoption trends for Amazon and Google.

Consumers in the market for a smart speaker have more options than ever, and Amazon will lose some of its majority share as a result.

Unsurprisingly, seniors are the least likely adults to use any voice technology. According to our estimates, 3.8 million seniors in the US will use a smart speaker this year.

This year, 8.2 million baby boomers in the US will use a smart speaker. That's a 28.6% increase from 2017, according to eMarketer estimates.

This year, 24.9 million US millennials will use a smart speaker. That's more than a third of the millennial population and a 38.3% increase from 2017, according to eMarketer estimates.

This report analyzes our latest forecast for US voice assistant and smart speaker users, with a special focus on the growing rivalry between Amazon and Google.