25% of Online Adults Plan to Shop via Voice in 2019: Study

One in four U.S. online adults is likely to make a purchase using voice technology in the next year - and most will shop in their living rooms - according to a new Consumer Technology Association (CTA) study. CTA's 2018 Voice Shopping Report finds consumers who use digital assistants daily are much more likely to voice shop via a smart speaker - such as Amazon Echo and Google Home - or a digital assistant such as Apple's Siri.

"Digital assistants are enabling a fourth 'voice' sales channel to emerge, joining brick-and-mortar, online, and mobile as an avenue for buying goods and services," said Ben Arnold, senior director of trends and innovation, CTA. "Voice shopping is still a nascent practice, but as brands add more commerce-related skills and capabilities to digital assistants, we expect more consumers to experiment with voice shopping. This will play out broadly during the 2018 holiday season."

What Voice Shoppers Want: Among actual purchases via voice, the top product categories are food and groceries, followed by household supplies and consumer electronics.
 

CTA's U.S. Consumer Technology Sales and Forecasts Report expects voice-controlled smart speaker sales to continue to flourish, with 39.2 million units sold in the U.S. in 2018 (44 percent growth over 2017) after only three years on the market. Then, CTA expects sales to increase another 13 percent in 2019.
  
CTA's 2018 Voice Shopping Report presents the findings of a quantitative survey to an online national sample of 2,000 U.S. adult respondents. The study was fielded between May 18-25, 2018. The study can be found at CTA.tech/research.