On the morning of January 5 in a blog post, Google said, “The [Google] Assistant is now available on more than 400 million devices.” To Google, these “devices includes Android smartphones, tablets, TVs, headphones, and Google Home smart speakers.
By looking at the post, we don’t know how many Google Home, Mini and Max speakers were sold in 2017. Despite the fact 400 million is quite a respectable number, but more than likely, this number will include Android smartphones. If Google Home had pulled a good portion of those numbers, Google would have probably called them out specifically.
According to a review of data from NPR, Strategy Analytics and Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, it seems that Google Home has roughly 25 percent of the US market speaker market share. It’s estimated by Strategy Analytics that Google’s share of Q4 smart speaker sales was 24 percent.
In a survey of 1,622 US adults, Walker Sands (“Future of Retail 2017“) found that about 23 percent of respondents owned a smart speaker. If these results were generalized to the broader population, that would be something closer to 56 million assistant-powered speakers are in US hones today. This survey was conducted before Christmas, in late Q3 or Q4. 56 million seems to be too large.
Greg Sterling said, “But let’s assume, post-holiday, that there are now roughly 45 to 50 million smart speaker units in US households (Alexa + Google Assistant). Using the market share estimates above, it would potentially mean there are about 12.5 million Google Home devices in US households. That may be too low, but Google Home sales in the US probably don’t exceed 20 million to date.”