Currently, North America and Asia-Pacific are the two largest markets for voice control use. eMarketer projects that 91.0 million people in the US will use voice assistants at least monthly this year, representing 27.6% of the population. By 2020, that number will grow to 105.8 million.
In Asia-Pacific, China and South Korea are hotbeds of voice control technology development, and a study by J. Walter Thompson (JWT) Innovation Group and Mindshare Futures found that adoption was particularly high in Thailand and Japan. One reason is that the technology simplifies the use of character-based languages: 51% of regular voice control users in China and 57% in Japan said they used voice to save them from typing. In January, Accenture found that internet users in India and China showed relatively high interest in owning voice-enabled technology.
Usage is also strong in Europe. A multicountry survey by Capgemini, conducted in October and November 2017, found that 51% of consumers in the US, the UK, Germany and France already used voice control, with 81% doing so on their smartphones.
While Google and Amazon gained an early foothold in the US and are expanding into Europe and Latin America, China-based companies Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, JD.com and Xiaomi are making the most headway in that country. Samsung, KT, Kakao Corp. and SK Telecom have established early leadership positions in South Korea and other parts of Asia-Pacific. This landscape could undergo dramatic changes if and when some of the players in Asia-Pacific gain a foothold in the US and/or Europe, or vice versa.