Despite Privacy Concerns, Smart Speaker Owners Trust the Experience, Says Report

Referencing a “prevailing sense that we don’t have privacy anyway,” Tom Webster, Edison Research senior vice president, said last week on a webcast that a lot of smart speaker owners are “resigned to the fact everything is listening, everything is keylogging, getting our information all the time anyway -- so maybe this isn’t all that different.”

Joel Sucherman, NPR vice president-new platform partnerships, said consumers’ willingness to trade off a certain amount of personal data is “an extension of a handshake agreement” to give up some privacy for “functionality that makes my life better.” He compared the compromise to smartphone owners' willingness to allow Google Maps “to know exactly where I am … because I can get there now.”

Study participants interviewed in Los Angeles, St. Louis and Richmond, Virginia, showed little concern about the tradeoff of privacy for smart speaker benefits. One respondent expressed a sense of resignation: “I feel like the world we live in right now, we don’t really have privacy. We may feel like we do, but we don’t.” Another who was “not concerned at all,” said, “So they’re listening: what are they going to hear?” They might hear her talking to the cat or dog, “but they’re not going to hear any national secrets; I really don’t care.” A respondent who doesn’t “have anything to hide” admitted maybe he trusts “too much.” One who jokingly referred to Alexa as “my girlfriend” trusts his Echo speaker and hasn’t had any fraud: “My trust is pretty high with Amazon.” One participant said he found it “a little creepy” that his conversations were being recorded and “it’s always listening." But, he added, "I really don’t care." Smartphones have been listening to conversations for the past 20 years, he said: “And you’re worried about this new device?”

One user profiled in the report drew a line between audio and web privacy and video privacy. “The most important thing is, does it have video to it?” he said, setting a line he wouldn’t want crossed. That compared with “your boss can see where you’re surfing; you don’t like it, but you’re not doing anything crazy.”

Of smart speaker owners, 4 percent own a smart speaker with a screen only vs. 69 percent with audio only and 27 percent who owned both. Interest in video is growing in devices such as Amazon’s Echo Show and Google’s Home Hub, said Webster: Twenty-nine percent of smart speaker adopters showed interest in a screen-based device, twice that of non-smart speaker owners. Screen-based smart speakers are driving discovery and are considered easier to use, Webster said. NPR originally viewed smart speakers with displays as companion products to audio, said Sucherman, but as voice assistants are increasingly built into other devices, such as Amazon’s Fire TV, that will open opportunities for “pure video and other creative uses of visual and audio accompaniment.”

Discovery remains a challenge for smart speakers. Sixty-nine percent of owners say they don’t know enough about their speaker to use all the features. On how they discover new skills, 45 percent relied on friend and family recommendations, 34 percent used brand emails, 29 percent relied on searching the app, 24 percent used recommendations from the smart speaker and 18 percent used company ads and tech websites.

Playing music led the top 10 smart speaker requests in the spring report, with 77 percent of respondents saying they request music weekly, followed by getting weather (75 percent), asking a general question (74 percent), setting a timer or alarm and checking time (53 percent), getting news (42 percent), listening to an AM or FM radio station (37 percent), jokes (36 percent), sports scores (35 percent) and reminders (34 percent).

Respondents showed interest in using smart speakers for emergencies and for medical use cases: 55 percent expressed interest in having a feature that would allow their smart speaker to call 911 if multiple smoke alarms went off in the home, and 24 percent of respondents expressed interest in having a smart speaker feature that would recommend mental health resources if it detects users are feeling depressed or suicidal.

Among respondents who don’t own a smart speaker, 63 percent cited concerns over hacking of personal information, up from 41 percent two years ago; and 55 percent were bothered by the idea of speakers’ “always listening,” up from 36 percent. Answers to those privacy questions were similar for smart speaker owners with 58 percent concerned about hackers and 51 percent concerned about speakers always listening. More smart speaker owners, 49 percent, than nonowners (40 percent) said they're concerned about the government listening to their private conversations.

In Q&A, Sucherman said people ask smart speakers for news generally vs. topics they’re interested in because “it’s the quickest way to get an update.” But “the day is coming” when they’ll be more comfortable asking for “better answers” to deeper questions, he said. For that to happen, “a lot of work has to go into the back end in indexing content, ingesting audio and tagging it in a way it can be recalled,” he said, “not a small undertaking.”

Despite an overlap of smart speaker owners and podcast listeners, “not as many as could and perhaps should” are using smart speakers to listen to podcasts, said Webster, citing a “lag” in podcast listening on the devices. Sucherman cited two factors: podcast listening is a personal, intimate experience, while smart speakers tend to be located in communal places in a home; and it’s not possible to track listening to podcasts on a smart speaker when it’s being streamed over Bluetooth from a phone. More podcast listening may be occurring than is tracked, he said.

The number of skills smart speaker owners report using went down the longer they owned the speaker. Sucherman compared that to apps on a smartphone that narrow over time to ones consumers use the most. The number of skills used on smart speakers in a week period averaged 11.7 for those who owned their speaker for three months or less, 9.5 for one to two years and seven skills for users owning a speaker longer than two years, said the report.