eMarketer estimates that 39.4% of US internet users, or about 112M people, will use a voice assistant at least monthly this year, up 9.5% from 2018
Victoria Petrock / eMarketer : Tweets: @yoda Tweets: Drew Olanoff / @yoda : yeah by accident like when i say “DAMMIT” after stubbing my toe and siri is all like “i'm sorry, i can't help you with that” cool stats, bro. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Voice assistants crossed into the mainstream this year: eMarketer now counts about 112M US internet users — 39.4% — using one at least monthly, up 9.5% from 2018. The composition matters more than the headline number: an earlier Voicebot survey put monthly in-car use at roughly 77M adults versus 45.7M on smart speakers, so the car, not the speaker, is where most of this audience actually lives.
The growth also sits on a narrow base of engagement. A companion survey found 17% of online shoppers buy regularly through voice, while another found 46% of US adults never touch a voice assistant at all — so the 112M figure describes deepening habit among existing users far more than new converts.
First-order effects
- Amazon's developer lead — 56,750 US Alexa skills against Google Assistant's 4,253 Actions as of January — gets more valuable as the monthly-use base expands, because each incremental user raises the return on already-built skills rather than requiring new ones.
Second-order effects
- Brands and retailers face a widening gap between audience size and monetization: with only 17% of shoppers buying via voice regularly, the 112M users pressure merchants to build voice storefronts before purchase behavior justifies them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, voice settles into a utility tier — timers, music, weather, quick answers — that later AI-assistant surveys show mirroring 2018 usage almost exactly, while the never-user bloc stays large enough to keep voice a complement to screens rather than a replacement for them.
The trend: Voice assistance is becoming a default ambient interface anchored in the car and routine tasks, with commerce and developer ecosystems lagging well behind raw user counts.